


BROTHERS

by leepepper



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 2010s, Academia, Alaska, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - College/University, Bipolar Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, College Football, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Family, Flashbacks, Friendship, Gen, Infidelity, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Nonbinary Character, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Recreational Drug Use, first nations character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 07:08:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 70,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27579613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leepepper/pseuds/leepepper
Summary: In the fall of 2017, Loki moves back in with his estranged older brother: Thor Skywalker, star linebacker of the Marvel University Avengers. Over a year, he and Thor are revealed to themselves and each other in possibly the worst light, and surprisingly, that might be enough to save their relationship forever.At least Loki is getting paid for his suffering.
Relationships: Amora & Loki & Namor the Sub-Mariner, Amora & Loki (Marvel), Brunnhilde | Valkyrie/Thor (Marvel), Frigga | Freyja & Loki & Odin & Thor (Marvel), Hela & Loki & Thor (Marvel), Jane Foster/Thor, Loki & Namor the Sub-Mariner, Loki & Thor (Marvel), Loki/Tony Stark, Sif/Thor (Marvel)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 15





	1. AUGUST

**Author's Note:**

> okay so before we dive in, let’s all make room for a huge disclaimer.
> 
> i am writing this as a person who has not seriously followed the mcu since iron man 3. yes, you read that correctly. it’s been seven years since i seriously gave a shit, and the only films i’ve seen in phase two are im3, winter soldier, and ultron (after ultron i yeeted out of there fast), phase three are ragnarok and black panther. furthermore, i’m not particularly interested in filling all the gaps in my viewing experience. i might give the ant-man movies, captain marvel, spider-man, and guardians of the galaxy a watch, but it’s not too high up on my to-do list. 
> 
> you see, i have a problem with the mcu that basically boils down to capitalism, consumerism, episodic structure, and imperialist propaganda (yeah, i’m that asshole). i’m not going to break it down because to do so would give me a headache and the issue is much more complicated than the four buzzwords i just brought up, but suffice it to say my concerns are enough to turn me off from a serious relationship with the mcu.
> 
> that being said! i came around to this au for three reasons:  
> one: i love (most of) these characters and their relationships, realized or not, with each other, regardless of how i feel about canon.  
> two: i have a complicated love/hate relationship with universities and the academic/social hellscape they engender. having been to university since the last time i did this au, i have a new perspective on the whole thing.  
> three: this au, in its original incarnation, marked the first time i seriously wrote anything as well as the first time i got serious recognition for my writing. i’ve since fallen into obscurity and orphaned the original fics, but those days and this au still have a fond place in my heart.
> 
> as i’ve implied, i did this au once before, way back in 2011-2013. i have links to the original fics on the orphan account, but you’re not going to get them because i’m way too embarrassed and proud to share that adolescent garbage with you. some of the plot elements and even dialogue from the original au have made their way into this redux, but i’ve done a lot of tearing the thing down and rebuilding it from scratch with the gifts of insight, maturity, changed taste, and new characters. also, this is primarily a mcu au, considering the characterization of most of the characters, but it grabs liberally from the comics and features characters that haven’t appeared in the mcu yet (namely amora and namor). since dropping off of the mcu in 2013, i haven’t read that many marvel fics at all, so i’m woefully unaware of the tropes associated with these characters and ships and as such may end up going way off the mark of what fandom has come to expect.
> 
> as of right now, i only seriously plan on writing the first chapter in this anthology (i.e., this fic in particular), but this is a fully-fleshed au and all the characters have something going on, so don't be surprised if more fics get written and compiled into a series.
> 
> loki’s characterization is mostly 2011 as hell, tbh, which coincidentally marks the last time i really, really felt attached to his personality. one thing about this au that is difficult and requires a great deal of brainpower is balancing the sometimes opposing forces that are these characters’ personalities if they weren’t superhumans and aliens with three-hundred movies’ worth of trauma and experience and growth behind them and references to canon, because that’s fun sometimes.

#  _AUGUST_

Somewhere on the edge of 3:00 AM, there is music in the apartment. Gritty electric guitar and a claptrap thunderous drumbeat. A sousaphone enters from the left and laughter erupts somewhere in the building’s solar plexus. For his part, Loki seethes, feeling a migraine tiptoe out of the crevice of his mind as he taps words out into the group text.

  
  


> **Today** 2:59 AM
> 
> **loki skywalker  
> ** you guys i think i’ve reached a whole new geologic level of anger
> 
> thor and co. have decided to jam out at three oclock on a tuesday morning and i’m not even about to lose my shit. no. i’m about to go into an anger coma
> 
> a fucking. coma

  
  


From the living room, a female voice whoops out in pure, unadulterated glee. Loki can hear his brother’s characteristic booming laugh over the clap of drums, can hear Volstagg - Thor’s most rotund friend - singing over it all, “ _Nobody could stop him, no, so we just carried on. Til the trashcan burst in flames and the next day he was gone!_ ”

  
  


> **amora akerman  
> ** Aw sweet Älskling [revolving hearts emoji] maybe you should come over to our place! You know I dont mind sharing my bed with you bebe [green heart emoji]
> 
> **namor mckenzie  
> ** What instruments are being played?
> 
> **loki skywalker  
> ** drums, electric guitar, i think a sousaphone, and a bass. they have amps and everything like
> 
> when tf did someone bring amps into my house and i didn’t know about it? why are there amps and a drum set in my house??
> 
> **namor mckenzie  
> ** Veto, no deal. Come over and sleep with Amora.

  
  


Loki begs to differ. Being, as he is, a twenty year old and thus thinking himself to be basically the most deeply nuanced and self-sufficiently extant adult on Earth, he will not suffer fools and be chased out of his own apartment that he himself is renting with all $600 a month he gets from his parents. Instead, he is flinging himself out of bed in his stupid cat sweatshirt and fuzzy wool socks and tramping out into the living room, where he finds just about what he expects to find: Thor on the drumset somehow wedged halfway into the kitchen, Sif and Hogun with their electric and bass guitars plugged into an amplifier, Fandral perched on the arm of the sofa with a sousaphone in his hands, and Volstagg on the recliner, singing at the top of his lungs.

“ _It's gonna touch you weird, then it's gonna make you scared!_ ” Volstagg crows, his red beard in braids that trail down to his collarbone and his mane of similarly russet hair pulled back into a wild ponytail. “ _But my friends you need not fear, because the place that I belong is here!_ ”

Nobody notices Loki. It is as if he is a strange shadow on the floor. Thor goes ham on the beat, Sif killing it on the guitar, and Loki is acting on pure instinct when he beelines for the nearest electrical outlet and unplugs the amplifier, cutting the cacophony down by half. Immediately, everyone stops and looks at him, and Loki counts the emotions he sees in the faces he is greeted by: confusion, irritation, invitation, rage.

“Yo, what the fuck, Loki?!” Thor cries out, throwing a drumstick down against the floor tom and standing up, which, uh-oh. “Why do you always have to come in and ruin things just when they’re getting good?”

The Loki that is eternally thirteen, hurting and genderqueer and sensitive as the whitest lily in the greenest valley, wants to run away and cower in the face of his big, bad brother; in the face of anger as ferocious as Thor’s; at the nascent threat of possible violence. The Loki that is in this room right now is standing his ground and announcing, “It’s three o’clock. How about getting a hobby that isn’t like three million decibels in the middle of the night?”

“Maybe we should stop,” Fandral starts to say, faltering a little when Thor starts to wave his hand dismissively in the air.

“No, fuck that!” Thor exclaims. He points emphatically at the ground. “We’re here, we’re in college! We’re jamming out whenever the hell we want to jam out, because this is the only time in our lives we have to-”

“Oh, _God_ , let me know when you’ve climbed out of your own asshole.” Loki turns around and walks directly into his room. “I’m going to bed!” He slams the door, and Thor is screaming from the other room, and that, as we say, is that.

  
  


> **loki skywalker  
> ** i think i showed them
> 
> **namor mckenzie  
> ** Spike Thor’s drink with antifreeze [winking face with tongue emoji]
> 
> **amora akerman  
> ** Nooo don’t do that!! I have not yet had my chance with The Mighty Thor [smiling face with heart eyes emoji]
> 
> **loki skywalker  
> ** [face vomiting emoji]

  
  


They moved into this place a week before the semester started. A strip of apartments in suburban Anchorage, the Skywalker brothers on the very end in number 4. After two years of somewhat horrific dormitory life, Loki decided to get out and get a place of his own, thus checking off yet another criteria of adulthood aside from age. He’d talked about moving in with Amora and Namor for several months, and most of the summer that had been the plan, but then two and a half weeks before the beginning of Fall 2017, Thor came back home after his lease on the house with his football friends ended and announced that Steve was moving in with Bucky Barnes, Sam Wilson, and Natasha; Tony was moving in with James Rhodes; and Bruce was moving in with Valkyrie, thus leaving him and Clint to their own devices regarding their place of residence. Their mother stepped in of course. She would have been a bad matriarch not to. She did the most goodnaturedly manipulative shit of the century and threatened to stop handing over the monthly six-hundred bucks if her sons didn’t live together.

For a full day, Loki and Thor didn’t speak. This wasn’t really unusual, even during the summer when they were forced to cohabitate in their parents’ house. Thor argued with their mother about it for an hour and a half and then decided all at once that he was on board, spurred on by some altruistic or otherwise insane impulse. Loki remained deeply pissed off for two days and frantically texted his friends about his situation.

  
  


> **amora akerman  
> ** You should do it! You and Thor will be able to mend bridges and be friends if you do
> 
> **namor mckenzie  
> ** She’s literally just saying that because she wants to perv on Thor when she sleeps over.
> 
> College is stressful enough when you’re not living with a moron. Don’t do this, please.

  
  


Then, Mother came to Loki one night after dinner, which she’d cooked especially for him. He’d known something was up when he came downstairs and the protein on the table had come out of the sea instead of the forest. Mother sat on the edge of his bed and put her hand on his foot and said, “You know, it’s been breaking my heart for years to see how you and your brother’s relationship has deteriorated.”

“Gee, Mom, I’m sorry but this doesn’t sound like a conversation I want to-”

“I’m not trying to be that mom!” Mother had a way of barrelling ahead and through anything she needed to whenever it was appropriate. “But I would like for Christmas this year to be a good one where we can come together as a family instead of just trying to act like one another doesn’t exist.”

Loki looked at his mother’s lined, Robin Wrighty face for a long time, feeling profoundly unlike her in his darkness and his bleakness. He picked at his Joy Division T-shirt. “You might have to wait until next year for that, Mom.”

Mother frowned, but didn’t look too let down. 

“Do you really think us living together is going to change everything?” Loki asked. “You don’t think it’s just going to make us hate each other more?”

“I’m optimistic,” Mother said with a renewed freshness about her. “You lived together for seventeen years, and for thirteen of those years, you were best friends.”

Loki made a snorting noise. He wanted to avoid another speech about “when you and Thor were young,” so he said, “It’s different now.”

“I know.” Mother was piercing, too, and in this way, Loki was definitely like her. “I’m no fool. But your brother really, really loves you, and I know it’s so gauche to openly give a hoot-”

“God, you’re so cute,” Loki swooned.

Mother squeezed Loki’s socked foot, looking so earnest and so beautiful. “But you love him, too,” she finished.

This, Loki would refuse to acknowledge as true. The next morning, he came downstairs for breakfast, and over coffee, eggs, and cheese Danishes, he declared his intention to move in with his brother on the condition that he got to choose the apartment as well as his bedroom within such apartment.

Thor and Mother exchanged a look of tentative excitement. “Done,” Thor said, and Mother did a little dance as she poured herself another cup of coffee.

Loki can’t say whether or not he truly regrets his decision. At least he’s getting paid for his suffering.

The first Wednesday of the semester, Loki and Amora work behind the library front desk. They check the books in and out and rent laptops and headphones to the many students of Marvel University. Whenever it’s dead (which it often is), they play Solitaire and Mahjong on their desktops and gossip at a volume that may or may not be heard by eavesdroppers and/or their supervisor. The conversation predictably turns to the faculty and staff of their dear university, and without warning, they’re playing an impromptu game of Smash or Pass with their professors as the smashees/passees.

“ _Fan_ , you know who I cannot stand?” Amora asks, her Swedish accent suddenly thick with disgust. When Loki just kind of grunts in acknowledgment, she frowns at her computer monitor but says, “Dr. Kilgrave. He’s so creepy, oh my God.”

Matching virtual tiles emblazoned with things like sakura branches and rising suns, Loki frowns gently. “I don’t know, man, some people like that whole starving, unshaved Brit thing.”

Amora looks at him with a happy, sort of feral glint in her eyes and doesn’t whisper, “I heard that Jessica Jones was dating him last year.”

“I literally don’t even know who you’re talking about,” Loki admits.

Apparently not caring, Amora says, “Supposedly they have had it off in his office, in Atlas 412, at his house, even in her dorm room.” She affects a full-body shudder befitting the topic at hand. “Cannot fathom anyone being attracted to that rodent.”

“I don’t know, Amora, that whole thing sounds sketch.” Loki finally looks at his friend, his expression one of veiled concern. “A professor sleeping with a student? _Hello_ , that’s super weird and abusive. He controls her grades, for fuck’s sake.”

Amora, who has begun since the conversation’s beginning to scroll through her Instagram feed, does not answer initially, engrossed as she is. Eventually, she remarks, “Dr. Rogg is beautiful.”

Loki rolls his eyes and prays for a better friend. “God.”

“I would get under that in a heartbeat,” Amora pronounces, almost purring. “Gjallarhorn, too. His beautiful chocolate skin and amber eyes-”

“I would judge you,” Loki says loudly, kicking Amora underneath the desk. “But we all know my taste is questionable as well.”

“I wasn’t going to say it!” Amora cries with a cackle. When Loki hangs his dark head in shame, Amora reaches over to pet his sleek tresses, cooing, “I love you, my disaster faggot.”

It would be two years now. Loki met Amora when he was a freshman at Marvel U and his randomly assigned roommate was Namor McKenzie, the son of a Chinese-American/Native Hawaiian heiress whose great-great-grandfather was an industrialist in sugar cane processing and thus one of the largest landowners in the United States territory of Hawai’i. Namor and his mother were heirs to a huge sugar cane processing empire from the turn of the twentieth century and, consequently, crazy stinking rich. Being that Loki was also a rich kid, he and Namor gelled immediately. 

They unpacked their clothes and negotiated the territories that were the bathroom sink and the shower, who was allowed into which space and why. Loki and Namor bonded through this, both of them thriving when their boundaries were respected and clear lines were being drawn in the sand. Loki was trying to think up recommendations for dining in Anchorage when a yell from the hallway disrupted their conversation; peeking out of their room, they found Miss Blonde and Curvy with a mess of clothes spilling from a lime green suitcase, swarming around the wreckage, talking in Swedish.

“Um,” Loki said, feeling smart and also very helpful. “Are you okay?”

The blonde girl looked at Loki and Namor and said, “ _Förbannat_. I knew I packed too many clothes.”

Namor made a low, soothing noise in his throat. “That happens to me all the time,” he said very honestly.

The blonde girl grinned. It was the start of a deep and beautiful friendship that occasionally bordered on romantic. If you asked Amora why she fell so deeply for Loki and Namor in that moment, she would have said something about their alleged warmth or their “vibes.” Loki would point out that they’re elitist, highly intelligent assholes who like to wear black, drink, and judge people. Shit works out.

The clock inches closer to 5:00 PM. The library is mostly dead at the moment, but students coming for their evening study sessions and classes are about to arrive in droves. Thankfully, Loki will not be present to witness the clusterfuck that is Marvel University students medicated by Adderall and Starbucks, as his shift ends in firmly fifteen minutes. Amora looks up from her phone and asks, “So what is it going to be? On a scale of one to World War II, how bad will the damage be today?”

Loki strokes a thoughtful hand through his oil slick of black hair. “I predict that it’ll be somewhere around 9/11 on the damage scale,” he notes, giving his lovely friend a wry look. “Care to be my firefighter?”

“You know I would love to, but I can’t!” Amora pouts with genuine regret, looking all at once like a beautiful blonde baby girl. “Namor and I are canvassing the sex shop that just opened downtown. It’s called Liberation. I need a harness for my strap-on.”

Feeling spiteful, Loki asks, “Why, so you can peg Dr. Rogg?”

“His ass is begging for me!” Amora cries just as a freshie-looking kid in a red and blue hoodie is passing by the front desk. Floppy-haired and pimple-faced, he gives Amora a strange look; she simply widens her eyes threateningly at him before turning back to her friend. “You should come with us. I’ll buy you condoms.”

“I’m not seeing anyone,” Loki says without a touch of sorrow.

“I’ll buy you a vibrator.”

“Already have one, my love.” Loki’s expression turns droll. “Besides, I have like two stupid long readings to get done before tomorrow and I’d rather be able to just go home, eat dinner, smoke a bowl, and then go to bed.” He blinks, re-listening to what he’s just said. “God, isn’t that depressing?”

“That you are three years into college and you’re already tired of buying sex toys and doing coke with your best friends?” Amora asks, perfect and unhinged. “Yeah, a little bit.”

“Who said anything about coke?” Loki asks, trying not to smile.

“Oops.” Amora has the mischievous look on her face that made them such close friends when they were fresh meat spoiling for dumb bullshit to get into. “I guess I ruined the surprise.” She reaches out for Loki, touching the snake tattoo on his forearm with gentle, manicured fingers. “Come _on_. If you do coke with us you will not even have to go to bed, and you can do your reading when and where it was meant to be done: at three in the morning in our kitchen.”

Loki thinks hard about the prospect for a moment. He misses his friends after a whole summer without them, and he’s feeling more than ever the poignancy of choosing not to live with them, the people who know and love him best. Being that it’s the very beginning of the semester, though, he utters sweetly, somewhat darkly, “Thanks, but I’m gonna pass. I sort of promised myself and my psychiatrist that I’d only smoke marijuana this semester.”

“For what reason, may I ask?” Amora asks without heat.

“Self-love, perhaps?”

“Why do you need to love yourself when you have two people who love you more than life itself?” Amora’s smile is flawless and contagious, too good for words. Loki puts a hand over his mouth and looks away, at his phone. 

“A question I’m not prepared to answer.”

They part ways with the stroke of five o’clock. Amora is off into Anchorage to purchase sex toys and tasty lubricant while Loki disappears into the library to study, because it’s in his best interest to get a degree within the next twenty-two months instead of experiencing the small, fleeting pleasure of shopping with his best friends. It’s Wednesday. The sky is clear and it’s actually in the upper sixties today, which is nice for Alaska. Loki checks out a study room on the third floor and unloads his books, laptop, leather jacket, and various Sticky Note/ballpoint pen/chewing gum-shaped things onto a big blue table; screencasts his laptop to the television overhead; plays Alex G and Neutral Milk Hotel in the background while perusing articles on sex-linked characteristics and passages in his art and mythology text. It is his third year at this godforsaken private liberal arts university, this product of 1939 optimism for the future, this castle in the north where his parents met in the mid-80s. Reading about trickster gods and ancient poetry, he thinks about this fact of life: that in 1985, Odin Skywalker met Frigga Vanir met on the steps of this here library, studying architectural design and English literature respectively, clad in real fur and cute jumpsuits, saying, “Oops,” when they bumped into each other.

“I didn’t hit you too hard, did I?” Then-Father asked Then-Mother, gently holding her arm so that she wouldn’t go toppling over. Then-Mother curved her mouth into her signature dazzling, hypnotizing smile.

“I can take a little bit of a beating.” Mother always thought that part of the story was so cute.

They only dated for about a year at the time. They had “incompatible” ideas about life. Frigga wanted to write books and poetry in the vein of Anne Sexton and Anaïs Nin, to live in a second-floor walk-up and smoke cigarettes and suffer through shitty dates with repulsive men in the pseudo-hellscape of the late 80s. Odin, on the other hand, was taking over the reins of Asgard - an architectural firm founded by his father Bor Skywalker in the early 1950s. Odin was birthing grand suburban subdivisions and a new hospital downtown, trying to outdo his father’s greatest accomplishment: the Anchorage International Airport. Frigga was ironing her clothes in her bra and a plaid skirt, tapping verse out on the typewriter her mother had given her as a fabulous graduation present. It couldn’t have worked out for them at the time - not until 1993, when Odin nearly knocked Frigga off her feet again, this time entering/exiting an Alaska House of Coffee.

“Christ, when will I stop doing that to you?” Then-Father asked his old college flame. He caressed her hand with his because it was easy to and because she wasn’t going to tell him to stop.

Then-Mother caressed him back. “When it stops being fun, of course,” she replied with a demure smile. Within a year, they were married and Frigga’s belly had done the second trimester _pop!_ , and all of a sudden Thor was in the world and it all, all of it, was meant to be. The flawless son with blue eyes and blond hair. The romance that was lifted straight out of a Diane Lane movie. The big four-bedroom New Traditional Victorian house in suburban Anchorage. All the money, and the white roses, and the golden jewelry, and the love.

Loki ruined things. Jotting down _ask about Reynard_ in his lilting scrawl on a yellow Sticky Note, he knows this in his marrow, that he ruined things when he came into his parents’ perfect world.

He wasn’t theirs, originally. The bio son of a Russian-American prostitute and a mathematician of Inuit descent employed at Agsard, he came into their lives like a car crashing into the side of a building: bloody and loud. The hooker mom died in childbirth and the booksmart dad brought a baseball bat to work and split the side of a coworker’s head with it, subsequently ruining his sixteen-year career and finding it the perfect time to end his own life. Frigga, who felt sympathy for all lost and pathetic things in this world, pitied the infant left behind and convinced her good, brave, smart husband to adopt Loki and raise him as his own son. Loki wasn’t ever even told his birth name, and he supposes it doesn’t really matter, especially twenty years later.

He arrives home at around 6:45. The sun is low but the sky is a perfect blue, with dusky clouds passing in an almost funereal procession above. He tenses up and begins to enter the realm of real panic as soon as he turns onto his street in his big teal GMC pickup truck from the mid-60s, anticipating the disaster that will greet him once he walks in the front door. Namor keeps telling him he needs to start meditating and practicing progressive muscle relaxation, but truth be told, Loki has never had the presence of mind for that kind of shit. If he had a nickel for every calm day of his life, he’d maybe only have twenty-five cents in the palm of his hand.

This is what Loki usually has to look forward to when he comes home:

1) Fenris (the Alaskan Malamute puppy _very_ newly made his own) locked in his bedroom with a full bladder and an empty stomach.

2) The kitchen a mess, the sink full of dishes, cookie and chip and popcorn crumbs splattered across the floor, nothing in the fridge but beer.

3) Some permutation of Thor, Fandral, Volstagg, Hogun, and Sif.

4) Empty (mostly alcoholic) drink containers.

5) Miscellaneous trash items such as hollow cigarette boxes; wadded up mats of Thor, Sif, and Volstagg’s hair in the crevices of the room; fast food receipts on the living room table; half-finished bags of barbecue-flavored Lays.

6) Noise.

6a) Noise from the Xbox.

6b) Noise from the PlayStation.

6c) Noise from Thor and his friends.

6d) Noise.

Today when he walks in the door, conditions one through 6a are all being met. Thor and Sif are piled on top of each other on one sofa, playing _FIFA Whateverthefuck_ on the Xbox, while Fandral, Volstagg, and Hogun all linger around the open concept living room/kitchen, sitting in recliners and on the bare carpet playing spoons with bottles of beer on hand.

“Hey Loki,” Thor says without looking away from the TV.

“Salutations,” Loki throws back with a touch of sarcasm, moving towards the kitchen as calmly and quickly as he can. Fandral’s voice stops him like a hand on the shoulder.

“Welcome home, kitty cat,” comes the unwelcome purr, and honestly, Loki might have to take three showers tonight just to get the feeling of disgust and dirt off of and out from beneath his skin. He chooses to instead freeze for a moment, ground himself, and ignore Fandral entirely as he passes into the kitchen with the lech on his heels.

“You making dinner, Loki?” Volstagg asks from where he sits on the floor with a pair of sterling silver spoons in his hands. He reaches to take a swig from his Miller High Life, and as Loki paws through the kitchen, looking for a single grape or slice of cheese or drop of fruit juice, he wonders why it is his duty to cook. Why is it that he, an ovolactovegetarian whose tastes run more towards wine and other various fruit products (much unlike literally everyone else in this room), is responsible for the making of supper? Is it because he looks like a nineteen year old girl with his smudged eye makeup and his long, distinctly native hair? Is it because he is subservient and inferior in the eyes of everyone here, and things like cooking and cleaning befit him more than doing anything else? Loki considers this and more as he pokes through the cabinets and finds nothing but his various seasonings and items like sugar and flour, his anger rising within him close to a volcanic, slipshod boiling point and he hasn’t even been in the house for more than five minutes.

“I can’t cook if there’s nothing in the kitchen,” he bites out. There’s a banana on the kitchen table. Great.

Without missing a beat, Fandral is sliding up next to him and putting a hand on his shoulder, making him see red momentarily. “How was your day, doll?” he asks with this stupidly happy smile on his face, and Loki knows what it means, knows that Fandral thinks that after their month-long, drug- and alcohol-fueled, purely sexual fling in his freshman year, the two of them are some kind of couple and he is just so pleased to see Loki, his boyfriend, on this day. Every day, in fact. Because they’re a couple, remember? Or at least an ex-couple, which might even be worse.

Loki picks up Fandral’s hand as if it is a piece of hot trash and tosses it off of his shoulder. “You wouldn’t be interested,” he says with so much contempt.

“Of course I would,” Fandral feebly protests, pouting.

“We’re not together, you know?!” Loki can’t help but explode a little, looking at Fandral and his stupid poofy blond hair with a piercing, almost enraged quality to his eyes. “We never were together, so you don’t have to be all cute and ask me how my day was or whatever. I’d rather you just left me alone.”

Fandral seems to genuinely consider this for a moment. Surprising no one, he ends up saying, “I’m still going to ask you, sweet,” in his distinctly Cajun accent. Loki makes the conscious decision to levitate his eyeballs.

Thor met his posse as a freshman in the same way Loki himself met his friends - via the powers of random roommate selection and fate. In no time, the five of them had a collective young adult friendship founded mainly on roughhousing, heavy drinking, and generally going on adventures together through Anchorage, and this was mostly fine by Loki as he wasn’t forced to confront the particular arrangement of personalities and intentions that was Thor and his group of friends. The most they interacted was in passing, if they ended up at the same party or passed each other in the hallways. Now, though, he actually has to deal with Fandral, Hogun, Volstagg, and Sif, and he’s not quite sure why he’s surprised that he hates them as much as he does. Maybe in his time spent away from Thor, he thought he was getting magnanimous due to the distance between him and his least favorite person.

Last year, Loki and Thor got in a tiff over what his friends’ redeeming qualities were. Thor vehemently insisted that they were loyal, hilarious, and fun to be around, while Loki bolstered his own argument by citing their intellectual laziness, general boorishness, and poor sense of personal boundaries. 

“In fact, Hogun is the most tolerable because he barely speaks, and Fandral’s only redeeming quality is the fact that he’s queer,” Loki said with authority, sitting in his parents’ den and trying desperately to will Thor away from him into some other corner of the house. 

Thor gave him a look of pure mystification. “How is that a _good_ thing? Isn’t that just a neutral fact?”

Loki rolled his eyes as he often did. “You wouldn’t get it,” he said with an affected sigh, turning emo-ly away from his brother to stare out of the window where the snow was falling in fat little flurries. “You’d never understand.” And maybe he was right.

“You think football is superior to basketball?” Sif is asking Thor in the living room, wrestling the Xbox controller out of his hands and starting a new match on _FIFA_ or whatever. “Please. At least us basketball players can play the game for decades without risking traumatic brain injury.”

“That’s what makes football better, though,” Thor is arguing, sounding a little like he’s on the verge of legitimate anger. “We get all roughed up and bloodied and it’s like, yes, this is a blood rite that all of you will go through instead of you being a pussy and dribbling a ball around a court for an hour.”

“ _‘Pussy’_?” Sif asks with newfound notes of displeasure in her tone. She raises a hand and smashes it into the side of Thor’s face, vicious and loving. “Speaking that way with a lady present, now that’s a damn shame.”

“You’re just pissed because your pussy ass can’t top this two-hundred and fifteen pound wall of man,” Thor retorts, flexing his right bicep emphatically ( _gag_ ). He grabs Sif by her side and pulls her into a violent embrace of sorts, and they’re rolling around on the couch together, fumbling the controller, laughing, uniting their mouths in a passionate kiss.

“I’ll top you alright, you big hunk of stupid,” Sif laughs against Thor’s open mouth. There are her hands in his long blond tresses, and there are Thor’s hands on her lower back, and there is Loki feeling so acutely the discomfort of watching his brother’s on-and-off girlfriend/friend with benefits/future ex-wife belittle and make out with said brother in his living room, all while he scavenges for food and avoids eyerape as deftly as he possibly can. There was a time during the previous semester when he entertained the thought of he and Sif being great friends as co-conspirators against Thor’s massive ego, but whenever Loki was forced to witness her strange behavior towards his brother - alternately scornful and impossibly twitterpated - he shoved these thoughts away in favor of just sitting in his uneasiness with Sif, who he cannot and will not understand.

He makes an executive decision, clutching his iPhone tightly in his pocket and thinking sort of calm thoughts.

“I’m going to McDonald’s,” he announces to the room, not even putting his backpack down on his way out. Of course, before he can get even halfway to the front door, four out of the five other people present are on their feet and staring him down like he’s in an anime or something.

“Can you grab some grub for us?” Thor asks. “We’ll pay.”

“DQP with cheese, thank you,” Fandral says with a wink before Loki can even reply.

“Seconded,” Thor says immediately. “With root beer, because root beer’s the shit.”

“Thirded,” Sif chimes in.

“Oh my God, shut the fuck up!” Loki interjects before anyone can get a word in edgewise, throwing his hands up in the air in the universal gesture of _STOP_. He struggles to get his phone in front of his face, says, “Let me get my Notes app and make a list, Christ.”

Volstagg and Hogun note their orders with a gracious smile and a polite nod, respectively. Loki shares his Venmo credentials with everyone and scurries out into the encroaching night, snapping, “You’re welcome. Lock the door, please.”

“Thanks, babydoll,” Fandral purrs and closes the door after him so swiftly he’s nearly bumped onto his face on the recoil. Loki spins around, hurling his lanyard with his keys at the door and screaming vowels in its general direction. After a moment of hard breathing, of thinking about just how much he’d fancy a good vomit right about now, he goes to pick his lanyard up off the ground by its anodized aluminum Minnie Mouse charm. Looking hard at the charm - Minnie’s cute, smiling silver face - he whispers out a quick, “Motherfucker,” and gets in the cab of his truck.

Loki drives around Anchorage. He bypasses going in the direction of the military base and all the military family houses clustered in that area of town, instead choosing to go southwest into the hood, the Third World with a touristy facade. He likes passing by the Wiki Wiki Donuts and the Carrs-Safeway and thinking about what it means to live in a metropolitan area with a donut shop and a supermarket chain in it, how deeply this fact about Anchorage contrasts with the reality of the neighborhood. Then he is in the land of the richies and the gentrified wannabes - ergo, the land of his family - sliding down A, B, D, and E Street and not really feeling at home, but being comforted by the familiar nonetheless. Finally, he makes it to the Westside and the hipstery neighborhood close to the airport, where his favorite McDonald’s from when he was a kid (and, therefore, not a vegetarian) resides. His breaths come slow and he is no longer shaking with rage when he orders his Filet-o-Fish with Sprite, Thor’s miscellaneous this and Volstagg’s miscellaneous that. 

When Loki gets back home, Fandral singsongs at him as he passes into the kitchen. “ _It took you long enough_ ,” he goes.

“ _You can fucking die_ ,” Loki singsongs back, dumping all the fast food on the kitchen table and grabbing his entrée, fries, and drink before he can be devoured by the wolves. As he approaches his bedroom door, he can hear is own little wolf whining and barking at the imminent entrance of his master and food, and just as he expects, Fenris is there at the foot of his bed when he comes in, overjoyed to see him and mad as fuck all at the same time.

“Hey, baby,” Loki croons, instantly liquid, dropping his food on his bed and going to scoop his big old puppy into his arms.

Nearly a full week later, Loki walks into his Science of Sexual Orientation class with about a minute to spare. It’s Tuesday and therefore the worst day of his week, his everything spilling everywhere, his head a loud Alzheimer’s tangle encased in bone, skin, and hair. For the second week in a row, his eyes go to the back of the classroom, where Tony Stark and Maya Hansen are chatting it up like old friends. His stomach is a sort of visceral knot the instant his gaze finds them, and without thinking, he’s staring at them in the doorway of the classroom, looking like a complete idiot.

The first Tuesday of the semester, Tony Stark had looked back at him upon his entrance with hope and a smirk of welcome all over his normally inscrutable face, both of his neighboring seats empty and inviting. Loki, at the time, just turned away and took a chair in the front row without a word. The following Thursday, Tony Stark gave him that same hopeful look, that time tinged with sadness and perhaps the barest hint of betrayal, and Loki turned his hard, black back on him again. Today, Tony Stark is too engrossed in what Maya is telling him to give Loki his eyes. Not registering an emotional response within himself, Loki sits down in what is now his customary seat in the front of the room and pulls his MacBook out of his backpack. 

Loki met Tony Stark last year, when he was an angry sophomore and Tony was a year into his tenure on Marvel’s football team, the M.U. Avengers. It was a football party, of course, and Loki was rip-roaring drunk on what the kid manning the bar was calling sangria but was probably actually jungle juice. That night, he puked his guts out in the home’s smaller of two showers, got in a fistfight with his brother, broke the thirty-two-inch flatscreen with a baseball bat (how like his bio dad he was), and infamously hocked a fat loogie into Steve Rogers’ pretty golden face. After the drunkenness but before the violence, Loki and Tony Stark somehow ended up together in Thor’s bedroom, poking around the mess of dirty clothes and books and empty beer bottles for a lighter with which to light Tony’s joint.

“I’m not having you rat me out to Thor just because you can’t handle any kind of roommate conflict, you know,” Loki said in the twitchy, kind of lackadaisical way that came naturally with his vodka drunkenness, digging around in Thor’s sock drawer for a Bic or a Zippo. “I know it’s hard for men like you guys to talk to each other about shit that’s not complete bull.”

“Men like us, you said?” Tony Stark asked him, looking smug and annoyed at the same time. He idly, sort of boredly flipped through the algebra text on Thor’s desk, like he wasn’t as concerned as Loki was about whether or not his own fucking joint was going to get lit tonight. “What’s that supposed to mean? Are you a different kind of man than us?”

“Dude, come on,” Loki scoffed, throwing one of Thor’s socks into the air and looking at Tony Stark kind of boldly, with his whole face and body pointing toward him like a cowboy. “You have to look at me for two seconds and tell me you’re not asking me a dumb question like that.”

“I don’t know, man, maybe we’re not so different,” Tony Stark said, then put his hand in his pocket and produced a Zippo that had always been there though he’d simply forgotten to look. He laughed a little at this, then handed Loki the light and the fresh joint with a sort of a flourish. “We both go to one of the best Ivies in the country, so that means we’re either rich, geniuses, or both.”

“Oh, yeah, you’re like _really_ impressing me,” Loki muttered around the butt of the joint before lighting it and taking a toke.

“You seem chaotic.” Tony Stark narrowed his eyes at Loki, scrutinizing him. “Are you an air sign?”

Loki, who was holding in his hit, shook his head and waited until he felt liable to explode before letting cannabis smoke escape him in a thick, sultry cloud. “Water,” he replied simply, throwing up some gang sign he’d seen on MTV seven years ago. “Although you’re asking me about astrology, which is interesting.”

“No, man, that’s Pepper’s thing,” Tony Stark deflected, and Loki vaguely knew who he was talking about - Pepper Potts, the business major in their class that hung around in Tony’s inner circle, apart from the Avengers crowd but familiar with them nonetheless. “She likes to tell me that I’m chaotic because I’m a Gemini.”

“Oh, Lord _God_ , you’re a Gemini,” Loki observed, then burst into laughter that made him sound like a hyena noise machine. “ _Fuck_ , you might be the most awful person I’ve met at this party tonight.”

“So I’m guessing you haven’t met Steve Rogers yet,” Tony Stark said with a touch of ridiculous gravitas, his tone playful but the weight behind his words palpable, shot through with genuine feelings of resentment.

“Steve Rogers hasn’t met _me_ ,” Loki retorted, moving in the direction of Thor’s bed and just barely managing not to trip over the pile of grass-stained football practice jerseys and blue jeans that happened to be directly in his path. He plopped down onto the mattress and immediately felt his whole body melt into the comforter, and in the low yellowish light from Thor’s desk lamp and the distant streetlight just outside the window, he felt weightless and warm and sort of woozy, ready to fall dead asleep with this not-stranger in his estranged brother’s bedroom.

After a long moment of Loki just staring at the popcorn ceiling, Tony Stark’s head appeared in his field of vision - orange sunglasses-bespectacled, joint in his mouth with a bright red cherry on the end. Casually exhaling smoke, Tony Stark asked, “You want something to drink?”

“I’ve been drinking all night, dude,” Loki replied in a half-mumble. “I just puked in the bathroom next door.”

“Oh, fuck, that was you,” Tony Stark said, laughing like a crazy person. He handed Loki the joint and the lighter. “Are you okay? Do you want a glass of water?”

It was so nice, really. So nice to be treated like a person by somebody the world at large deemed so cool, so nice not to simply be the weird artifact in the room labeled _THOR’S YOUNGER BROTHER_. Loki sat up, took a long, good hit off of Tony Stark’s joint, and said through the reflexive tears that always accompanied a really killer toke, “Alright, spoil me.” 

Tony Stark spoiled him. He brought him water and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich from the kitchen, and when Loki refused to eat on the grounds that he was trying to get high, Tony bossed him around until he finally took two bites and left the rest for Thor on his nightstand. Together, they sat in Thor’s queen size and talked about and around each other like two boxers in a ring, never showing each other their vulnerable backs or even their sides, dancing in circles until Loki was dizzy. He’d known who Tony Stark was, of course - if anyone at Marvel U between the years of 2015 and 2019 knew anything, they knew who Tony Stark was - but the real surprise was finding that Tony Stark knew him, too.

“Thor talks about you a lot,” Tony Stark told him while he tried to clean his glasses, which he’d only come to this dumb party wearing because he hadn’t had a chance to go back to his dorm room and put his contacts in before riding over with Amora. “He likes to tell stories about the weird stuff you did when you were a kid, like how you couldn’t stand Swiss cheese because it had holes in it and that, quote, ‘triggered’ you.”

“Oh my God, I’m going to kill him,” Loki whined into his hands, fighting the very real urge to cry at the newfound knowledge that campus royalty such as Steve Rogers and Tony Stark knew about his weird idiosyncrasies and his pubescent neuroticism. “Where is he? I’m really going to rip his brain out of his head with my sheer psychic power.”

“I’m glad you came here tonight,” Tony Stark remarked, looking at Loki as if he was a precious, imperiously green jewel. “You said you made a mistake, but I don’t think you did. I think you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.”

Loki gave Tony Stark a perplexed look through the gaps between his fingers. “Why do you say that? That’s so imbecilic.”

“If you hadn’t come, I wouldn’t have gotten to lie in Thor’s bed and get high with you,” Tony Stark said.

Feeling utterly like himself - hateful and bitter and so full of tar and pitch he was vomiting it onto the sidewalk - Loki scoffed, “Forgive me if I’m not leaping for joy.”

Of course, that was the moment that Thor decided to come in the room with, Loki’s not sure if he remembers correctly, Jane Foster or Valkyrie (but definitely not Sif at that time), and then Thor was yelling at the top of his lungs about what the hell was he doing in here with Tony Stark, and why were they touching his stuff, and what were they planning, and who did they think they were, and in the mess of the fight and all the carnage that succeeded their conversation, Loki and Tony Stark lost each other for what could have been forever had Marvel University not been so small and the degrees of separation between them not been so tiny. Within the week, Tony Stark had managed to track Loki down and strike up a relationship with him that steadily alternated between droll friendship, cutthroat flirtation, and high-temperature antagonism.

“I like us so much,” Tony Stark said to Loki one night while they sat in his, Thor’s, Steve’s, Bruce’s, and Clint’s backyard in front of the firepit. He _clink_ ed his Blue Moon against Loki’s where it was sitting on the ground at their feet, and Loki felt the _clink_ and the slosh of Belgian-style wheat ale inside him, the sweet and cold Alaska stars above them in the sky. “Nobody’s as smart as us.”

“Or as pretty,” Loki remarked sarcastically.

“Seriously,” Tony Stark said with an abruptly grave look on his face. He tried hard to hold Loki with the magnetic force of his eyes. “Nobody gets it like we do. We just have shit figured out.”

Loki didn’t know how he felt about the sudden intensity of his companion (he could never have brought himself to call Tony Stark his _friend_ ; their relationship just didn’t feel like that), so he avoided Tony’s eyes and sipped from his beer. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked evenly.

“Do you ever feel like you have secret knowledge that normies just can’t access?” Tony Stark asked, using the word _normie_ so utterly earnestly it made Loki want to laugh and cry at the same time. “Like you’re special and nobody else is like you?”

“I thought that was one of the criteria for attending Marvel U,” Loki quipped, looking at the sky.

Tony Stark smirked. His voice got soft and silky. “Have you ever felt like you met the one person that was like you? That was special and smart, too?”

Loki met and held Tony Stark’s gaze then. He was being looked at the way little girls died to be looked at when they were in their seventh grade English class reading _Romeo and Juliet_ or _Pride and Prejudice_ for the first time. In his leather jacket lined with faux rabbit fur, he shivered a little and said, “I’ve never really thought about it.”

Tony Stark nodded and tapped his temple with his index finger, then leaned back in his chair and took a long, professional swig from his Blue Moon.

Halfway through Science of Sexual Orientation, Loki’s phone vibrates against the tabletop, its screen briefly coming alive with the notification before dying into blackness once more. In the two or three seconds the screen is alight, Loki is able to read the text message he has just received.

  
  


> **Today** 9:17 AM
> 
> **tony stark  
> ** Starbucks after class? I’ll pay [winking face emoji]

  
  


Without even considering it, Loki ignores the message. He types notes on Dr. Rogg’s powerpoint lecture and feels Tony Stark watching him ignore the message, feels those brown eyes crawling over his back, over every dark stitch in his grandpa sweater. When class is over, he doesn’t take the time to put his laptop in his backpack - just closes the fucker and makes a mad dash out of the room, taking the stairs two at a time down three floors so he doesn’t get caught up by Tony waiting for the elevator. It’s childish, maybe even a little hysterical, but Loki knows as he walks out of Atlas Hall into the slightly chilly outside that aside from him having work in fifteen, the thought of having coffee and shooting the shit with Tony Stark makes him cold with fury.

The next day, he goes to the biweekly Yoga Club meeting with Amora after work. This is his meditation, he will tell Namor on the phone later - this changing into tank tops and leggings and going through the various geologic, geometrical, and animal poses over the course of forty-five minutes twice a week. Alongside his best friend and various other Marvelites, Loki breathes and listens to the instructor’s velvet voice guiding him through each position, stretches his muscles and presses his soles down flat against his $60 Saturn Devouring His Son yoga mat, feels himself perfectly thoughtless and perfectly at home in his weird, long body. Coming out of child’s pose, though, his frenetic thoughts have begun to percolate again at the back of his head, and he’s poking Amora where she rests on her mat at his right. Amora pokes him back. He whispers, “Tony asked me to have coffee with him yesterday.”

Amora’s eyes become very large very fast. “Ooh!” she cries almost loudly, signaling to the entire class that it’s okay to start talking at a normal volume now. She watches Loki get to his feet, holding her hands up to him for help and asking, “Did you take a shit on his face? Did you _dunka_ him into the nearest rubbish bin using your gifts of superior height and strength?”

Loki cannot help but laugh a little at the mental image; he grasps Amora’s pale hands in his and pulls her into a standing position. “He’s a football player, the last time I checked. I think he’s stronger than I am.”

“ _Älskling_ , you could fuck Tony Stark _up_ , and I would pay to see you do it,” Amora retorts with an exaggerated gesture of affirmation. Several mats away, Natasha Romanoff (resident Avenger) looks up at the mention of Tony Stark’s name, and Loki is past caring about his reputation or word of mouth after his whole image was shattered last year with that infamous party, so he chooses to ignore the fact that she’s probably eavesdropping.

“I ran away,” he admits, rolling up his mat and putting it in the stupid paisley yoga bag Amora bought him last year for his birthday. He doesn’t want to look at Amora, shamefaced as he is, so he looks at the floor and tries to find his shoes. “I knew if I had to talk to him I was probably going to punch him, or like, vomit on him or something.”

“Oh, Loki…” Amora croons. “Offensive vomiting? He deserves it.”

“Well, _yeah_ , but do I deserve the headache of having a conversation with him, not to mention the distinction of having publicly expelled bodily fluids on not one but _two_ Avengers?”

“I say you shape your entire reputation around it,” Amora says, doubled over as she and Loki slip into their Converse and their Uggs. “Spit on Rogers, vomit on Stark, pee on your brother.” She resumes her full height and looks around the room, then points at Natasha. “Are you sweating? You can get Romanoff right now.”

Natasha gives them a hard, enigmatic look. Loki makes his expression purposefully dull and says, “She’s kidding,” not really caring, but feeling like a kind of nice person at this moment.

Natasha’s expression, sphinxlike as ever, doesn’t change as she replies, “Good,” in her thick Russian accent and walks summarily out of the room. Amora mimes vomiting, making the retching noise and everything.

“She’s such a bitch.”

“Please, she’s your hero,” Loki says, wrapping an arm around Amora’s shoulders and leading her out of the classroom.

“A football player with a stick up her _arsle?_ ” Amora scoffs, throwing her ponytail back over her shoulder. “No thank you.”

As they ride the elevator down to the first floor of the university sports complex/parking garage, holding hands, Loki drifts briefly in the calm, electric, somewhat aimless place he often is in post-yoga. He watches the mid-evening outside slide vertically by through the elevator windows and tries to count his breaths. He’s here for about fifteen seconds before Amora, sensing something real and nuanced, asks, “Are you going to drop the class?”

“And lose my dignity?” Loki shoots back.

Amora frowns delicately. “You never fussed at him, though, Loki,” she says, sounding so sad about it. “You never told him off. And now you’re stuck avoiding him for the next year or two while he thinks you’re still friends.”

“It’s a small university,” Loki says sort of breathily. “I was going to have to run away from him even if we weren’t in the same class.”

“Why don’t you ruin him?” Amora asks with a vicious grit and sincerity to her voice. They step off of the elevator and then pass into the Alaska August night together. “Just tear him to shreds, preferably in public.”

“Then I’d be that stupid asshole who fell in love with Tony Stark knowing just the way he is, then flipped my shit on him when he did exactly what everyone knew he was going to do with exactly who he was always going to do it with,” Loki says, a whole mouthful of words just out there in the crisp air. He scratches the back of his head, then adds, “In addition to being known as Thor’s younger brother who broke the TV and spit in Steve Rogers’ face in the Avengers party of Fall 2016.”

Amora stops walking in the middle of the sidewalk, giving Loki a piercing look. “You fell in love with him?” she asks, in that probing way that says she knows what the answer is.

Loki looks back at her, the wind stirring her flaxen tresses about her face and around her head, then turns to the darkening sky. “Or whatever us borderlines call it.”

He desperately craves the girliest coffee the campus Starbucks offers in a Venti cup. Knowing this intrinsically, knowing him as she knows herself, Amora links her arm with his and says, “Come. I will buy you a strawberries-and-creme Frappuccino.”

“Light of my life,” Loki moans euphorically, allowing himself to be dragged along and feeling, for a moment, relief.

Then it’s the last weekend in August. Loki is in a rage, cleaning up the living room and the kitchen while his brother and Sif screw their happy little brains out in the second bedroom. He vacuums every bit of hair, lint, fuzz, dirt, and detritus out of every square foot of the living room, getting the little attachment hose and nozzle and going at it on the sofas and the recliners. He folds the afghans on the sofas and drapes them in an aesthetically pleasing manner on the arm and the back instead of leaving them sprawled and tangled all over the cushions as they had been before. He fluffs the pillows. He dusts the television. He arranges every object on the coffee table, placing his little tray with his pipe and his screens and his little padlocked box with weed in it on the far left corner of the table and lining up all of Thor’s weed paraphernalia (his one-hitter, bong, jar with a few little nugs left in it) and his hamburger wallet and ink pens on the opposite side. He sweeps and mops the kitchen floor with angry music on, _I wanna be forgotten! and I don’t wanna be reminded!_ , Fenris tramping after him with socks on his paws so he doesn’t get the linoleum dirty, Loki’s mind in some high and faraway place past Mars. He uses a dishtowel to scrub grease stains off of the stove and a newish sponge to scrape out every bit of food grime in and on every dish, glass, cup, and utensil in the sink. He takes out the trash, then replaces the trash bag because he knows Thor won’t later. 

All the while he listens. All the while he thinks. 

Thor and Sif make love. At this point, them having known each other for four years now, you have to call it what it is - lovemaking, not just fucking or having sex. Still, when they make love, Sif makes sounds like a porn star - all this _Unh! unh! unh!_ and _Yeeauuh! Yeeeauuuh!_ \- and Loki has to wonder if she’s genuinely enjoying herself or if she’s just making those noises because she’s under the impression that that’s what you’re supposed to do when you get fucked or when you fuck. Sorry - _make love_. He’s had to do so much correcting of himself lately.

Loki listens to their lovemaking as he cleans up their mess - mess that he has only elected to clean up because the alternative would be to live in squalor, and he’s not quite ready to take that flying leap into insanity - and he contemplates his own tendency to shrink into passive-aggression and snide, underhanded comments until the onset of borderline rage and bipolar hypomania comes along and sends him hurtling into outright hostility, into _fuck you all, I’ll fix it just like I’ve always fixed it_. He didn’t always use to be this way. When he was a kid, he was quiet - an emotional maelstrom on the inside, for sure; a Vesuvius waiting to erupt - but no one was able to tell, not even Thor, who knew him better than he even knew himself at that time. Then Loki turned thirteen and lost his goddamn mind, and he hasn’t been able to find it since.

 _Boohoo_ , says the peanut gallery. _When do we get to the part where they fight?_

Two hours later, Loki is smoking a bowl of Wedding Cake in the living room and blasting 1998 Cher on his Bluetooth speaker. Thor comes ambling out of his bedroom with nothing but a pair of gym shorts on - his dick and balls flopping grossly around beneath the supple, giving mesh fabric - and looks at his younger brother as if he is the strangest thing he’s ever seen.

“I didn’t even know you were home,” Thor remarks amidst the bass-booming and autotune-heavy ballad blasting through the house like a fucking sonic boom.

“Yeah, okay,” Loki scoffs, lighting up and taking another hit without another word. Thor rolls his eyes and goes into the kitchen, and does he say anything about the cleanliness? We’re afraid not today, but we’ll check in on them again in a week and see if conditions have improved.


	2. SEPTEMBER

#  _ SEPTEMBER _

On the first Sunday of September, Loki has his weekly check-in with Mother. They started doing this when he first left home for university, ostensibly because Mother read in a magazine somewhere that families that call each other once a week have healthier relationships, but also because she loves Loki as dearly as she loves herself. Loki knows for absolute certain that he’s never deserved her or anything he’s ever gotten because of her. He answers Mother’s call with a happy, contented sort of flutter in his center, putting down his MacBook and entering the calmest and clearest space within him.

“Hello?”

“Loki, darling, hi!” It’s the middle of the afternoon and Mother has a brightness to her voice that is as starling as it is familiar. This time of the day is  _ the  _ time for her, the time when all of her greatest ideas come to her and bustling about the house and typing at her desktop and making sandwiches for lunch and just  _ living _ is such a breeze. “I just got finished eating lunch. Lox and bagels, like your father and I are New York Jews or something. I know how much you like fish so I was thinking about you, and I considered inviting you over for a second then remembered that today is your homework day. So oh, well. I didn’t call you at a bad time, did I?”

“I mean, I was working on a paper, but it’s not due until Tuesday, so…”

“What’s the paper about?” Mother likes to ask this question because she so desperately misses her own paper-writing days at Marvel U, her Adler Favorit mechanical typewriter and her own bedroom off campus.

“Fraternal birth order and sexual orientation.” Where he sits atop his comforter, Loki uncrosses his legs and stretches them out in front of him, carefully toeing his laptop to the side. “Apparently these researchers in the late nineties discovered that a man with an older brother has an increased chance of being gay, or whatever. Setting aside the fact that I’m adopted, I’m not going to make the really easy joke about Thor and I.”

Mother laughs as if he has surprised her with his cutthroat honesty and glaring facetiousness. “Honey, you musn’t joke about such things, it’s such low humor.”

“I guess you’re right.” Loki shrugs, knowing Mother can’t see him. “That one was kind of easy, wasn’t it?”

“It was.”

“Yeah, I thought so.”

Then Mother is laughing again, and it’s all Loki needs to lie down flat in the center of his mattress and let the good maternal vibes wash over him, cleansing him of a week, maybe a month’s worth of little tensions.

“Tell me what else you’re working on this week,” Mother presses, and Loki can hear the sound of the back door opening and the wind chimes in the backyard singing their strange hollow song. “Any more papers? I want to hear your theses on all of them.”

“God, that sounds tedious,” Loki remarks without heat, staring at the popcorn ceiling and fighting the urge to just nestle into his pillows. “Some of them I haven’t quite worked out a thesis for, but I’m writing an essay about Christ analogues for my Religion and Media class that I think is kind of interesting.”

“Ooh, tell me about it.”

“Oh, it’s nothing really. Just me blathering on about  _ Terminator  _ and  _ E.T.  _ for like four and a half pages.”

“E.T. was a Christ analogue?”

“I mean, kind of.” Loki idly runs a hand through his hair, twirling one sable strand between his thin fingers. “He came from the heavens and healed with his bare hands and died and was risen again and all that shit.”

“Wow.” Mother whistles lowly, and Loki wonders if she’s smoking a cigarette for some inutterable reason. “Can you believe I never thought of it that way? Well, I never thought much at all about  _ E.T. _ or any other films in Mr. Spielberg’s oeuvre.”

“Honestly, I don’t blame you. Spielberg is so mainstream.”

Mother cackles with delight. “You would have been a hell of a beatnik, my darling.”

“I thought you were after beatniks.”

“My parents were beatniks, love. It’s how I know the type.”

This delights Loki. He tries not to sound too pleased when he asks, “Do you want to hear about my other paper? Or is that chapter of the conversation over?”

Mother clears her throat gently. “Oh, tell on. Listening to you is the best way to spend this part of the afternoon.”

So Loki tells. He talks about illustrations for the  _ Poetic Edda  _ and his own personal love for feminine lines in art, how much he hates Art Deco’s severity, how much he’d die to live in a soft, supple Neoclassical world. Mother asks him what he’d think if she commissioned some Sicilian sculptor to do a piece for the den, and when Loki asks who’d be modeling for the sculpture, Mother says exactly what he expects her to say - “Well, Thor, probably. He has the build and the hair and the face; he’d make such a lovely contrapposto.” 

Ignoring the miniature tidal wave of resentment that always comes over him in moments like these, Loki just doesn’t comment on all that and instead asks, “What’s the medium?”

“Marble would be classic, but your brother is so bronze, isn’t he?”

Loki closes his eyes and nudges his chin downwards a little. “That he is.”

They pass fifteen minutes going back and forth about metals and colors and poses and art movements, this the usual stuff of their conversations since Loki started going to Marvel U. Loki is obsidian rock, lapis lazuli, black glass, tiger’s eye. Mother is the most platinum of them all, encrusted with emeralds and sapphires, possibly the most valuable member of the Skywalker family. Eventually, they are laughing about Warhol and Loki is wondering aloud why he went into religious studies instead of art history or just plain history. “There’s always grad school,” Mother says, and this was to be expected. Loki loves her more than probably anyone in the world, but he knows of her standards (just as high as Father’s), knows that Loki Skywalker, bachelor of science, would simply not be enough for her in the grand scheme of things.

“How is your brother, dear?” Mother asks when the conversation has gone on long enough without Thor’s name passing through her lips.

“Healthy,” is Loki’s deadpan, bisyllabic answer. He’s never quite known how to tell her just how triggering any unnecessary mention of his brother is to him, so for all these years he’s simply gone on the defensive and went taciturn.

Mother, bless her heart, has never really taken it personally. “Oh, Loki,” she mutters,  _ tsk _ ing in disapproval.

“I don’t know, Mom, why don’t you call him and ask him? I’m not his keeper.”

“I try to call him!” Mother cries with a note of frenzy on the edge of her voice. “He doesn’t answer! You know how busy he is between football and work and class-”

“No, Mom, Thor just likes to play video games and get drunk with his friends. That’s why he doesn’t answer the phone.”

Mother is silent for a beat, then says, “I feel like you’re under the impression that Thor is a much worse person than he actually is.”

“I feel like you’re under the impression that he’s a much better person than he actually is,” Loki retorts, watching Fenris idly snuffle around the floor of his closet, where all of his boots and expensive sneakers lie.

“Maybe we’re both right,” Mother notes, not sounding very chagrined. “How about that?”

How about it, indeed.

“How are you, Mom?” Loki asks instead of continuing down this particular verbal path, casual, smooth about his topic-hopping. “It feels like it’s been ages since I’ve actually heard about what you’re doing.”

“Oh, I’m splendid, darling, splendid as usual. I’ve been sleeping better lately.”

“Really?”

“There’s something about Lunesta.”

“And here I thought the only thing it was good for was getting insufflated at football parties.”

Mother laughs, and for Loki, it’s perfect to know that he’s amusing to her, that he is clever and witty by her estimation. “You’re so cynical,” she remarks, truthful in her way because it’s the only way she’s ever known how to be. “The things you must see on a weekly basis.”

“Dark, scary things,” Loki agrees. He thinks about every black memory from his university career so far, episodes of alcoholic binges and casual drug use, of kids paying him to write their papers and used purple condoms on the quad. 

“That breaks my heart, kiddo,” Mother admits. “You deserve to be happy and naïve. Daisy Buchanan’s pretty little fool.”

“God, you’re so pretentious and so am I!” Loki exclaims, half yelling it into his pillow in his overwhelming embarrassment at being a person like he is.

“Apparently at least one of us is enjoying it!” Mother hollers back. 2:00 becomes 3:00, the sky is a perfect cornflower blue, and the Alaska afternoon slides on by with the good conversation and the temporary promise that everything is going to be okay for the next twenty-four hours.

On Wednesday, Loki tires deeply of the condition of the kitchen. He has had enough by now of finding vegetarian-friendly fast food for dinner and eating out of his friends’ fridge because his own is always infuriatingly empty. After getting home from class, work, and studying at around 7:15 PM; walking into the kitchen; and finding nothing but Italian roast coffee grounds, instant oatmeal, and seasonings on offer; he announces to the house (i.e. Thor, who is standing in front of the open refrigerator with his shirt off and a thin sheen of sweat all over him; and Fenris, who is bustling all around Loki’s feet), “I’m going to Carrs!”

Thor looks away from the single bottle of Budweiser hanging out in the back of the otherwise vacant refrigerator. He finds Loki with his eyes. “Can I come?”

Loki stops mid-tromp to the front door to give Thor a look of utter mystification. “Why?” he asks.

“So we can get groceries, jeeze!” Thor closes the refrigerator door kind of hard. “Besides, my Hummer is better for shopping than your piece of shit-”

“We’re not talking about Sleipnir, okay.”

Thor’s expression changes from somewhat irritated to just plain confused. “Sleep-what?”

“Shut  _ up _ , are we going to the store or what?” Loki finds that he’s suddenly the crazed thing Thor’s presence seems to always make him become, flinging his hands and his hair this way and that. “I’ll give you, legit, thirty seconds to put a shirt on and grab your keys or else I’m leaving without you.”

Thor starts walking at a pretty casual pace in the direction of his bedroom. “You’re really insane, you know that, right?” he says.

Not missing a beat, Loki jingles his lanyard in the air. “Twenty-nine…”

“ _ God _ , okay!” as Thor runs into his room in search of a top. “Fucking psychopath!”

Thor’s vehicle is loud in a way that Loki’s isn’t. Sleipnir - otherwise known as the turquoise 1966 GMC Loki has been hauling himself around in since he was sixteen years old and trying to show his parents that he could definitely pay for his own car - is loud because it’s old, has a shitty muffler, and was made to attract attention from the weaker-willed and easily-annoyed. Thor’s unnamed vehicle, on the other hand - a 2016 Hummer H3 that literally looks like a piece of military equipment - is loud because it’s expensive, ostentatious, and that’s how Thor likes it. He’s always taken after Father in his taste for the grand and the conspicuous, and Loki guesses that in a way they’re all like that, but he’s always been so much more low-key and subtle than the rest of his family and he feels that most acutely in the passenger seat of Thor’s car, his hands shaking a little with trepidation as he buckles his seatbelt. He hasn’t ridden in a car Thor has driven for three and a half years; this fact sits upon him like a stone, almost choking the air out of him as he tries to just casually look out of the window while Thor reverses out of their two-car driveway. 

It’s Wednesday night, so Carrs is not overly busy when they arrive. Mostly it’s just grandfathers, teenagers, and students like them doing their mid-week shop, clutching grocery lists on steno paper and iPhone Notes apps in their hands. Predictably, Loki and Thor sort of go their separate ways as soon as they grab their shopping carts, reasoning that their lists probably look nothing alike and that they’ll see each other at the register about twenty minutes from now. Loki drifts off in the direction of produce and deli, looking for what will satisfy his ovolactovegetarian (occasional pescetarian) tastes; Thor, on the other hand, looks like he’s headed straight for the booziest section of the store, to which Loki must afford a sigh. 

Is he worried? Yes.

Will he do anything about it? Nope.

He wants to make ratatouille and fried eggplant. This is good dinner to him, and he is a good cook as far as he knows. He bags squash, zucchinis, eggplants, tomatoes, and spinach. Blueberries call to him, so he adds them as well as bananas, kiwis, Granny Smith apples, pears, cantaloupe, honeydew, and watermelon to his basket. He surveys this - the fruit, the veggies - and feels only about seventy-percent confident that Thor and his friends won’t touch any of it, knowing that the past month has proved exactly the opposite for God knows what reason. In the deli, he collects blocks of cheddar and swiss with artisanal crackers, bags of pita and garlic roasted hummus, salmon fillets and a pound of boiled shrimp with cocktail sauce, and then it’s off to dairy for organic whole milk and Greek yogurt with chunks of strawberry in it. Because he is unfortunately fallible, he finds squares of sea salt chocolate in sleek blue packaging and decides he will hide this in his room rather than risk having it eaten by Thor and his parasites. This and the cheapest bottle of Merlot he can scrounge up, stamped with an orange $6.99 tag and looking positively disgusting (thus, perfect). 

On the way to the register, he nearly gets in a three-cart collision with Thor and a redheaded teenager in autumnal leggings. Thor, a wall of a man built to bulldoze through anything with a pulse, nearly goes hurtling right into Loki, who nearly goes hurtling right into the aforementioned teenager, who nearly goes hurtling right into a Little Debbie display, and it is only through the grace of some unseen power in the vicinity that all three parties manage to stop at exactly the right moment before they all hit each other.

“ _ Jesus _ , Thor, you’re going kind of fast,” Loki bitches, giving the random teenager an apologetic look and carefully maneuvering his cart in the direction of register 6. “You’re not the only person in the world that exists, you know?”

“Maybe you should just watch where you’re going like everyone else,” Thor retorts, following after Loki and slotting in behind him in line. Curious as to what his brother, a consummate carnivore, considers a good trip to the grocery store, Loki peers into Thor’s basket and nearly drops his jaw to the floor at what he sees. A three-pound bag of frozen chicken nuggets, pounds of roast beef and pastrami and honey baked ham from the deli, two loaves of white bread, seven bags of potato chips (all different flavors), two cases of Miller Lite that Thor’s probably going to go through in two days, rum, whiskey, bacon, eggs, two industrial-sized tubs of ice cream, literally thirteen different  _ Kid Cuisine _ s, a huge jar of dill pickles, and a birthday cake. As far as Loki is aware, none of Thor’s friends has a birthday coming up. 

“What is wrong with you?” he asks in a dull murmur, picking up the Carnival Mini Corndogs  _ Kid Cuisine _ . “ _ Kid Cuisine? _ Are you nine?”

“This is the shit and you know it,” Thor says, watching his brother continue to dig through his basket and mostly just looking annoyed and overly large in his red Marvel U hoodie.

“What the fuck, you have like, a birthday cake in here.” Loki holds one of the bread loaves in the air for emphasis. “Muffy,  _ sis _ , the carbs. You have  _ white bread _ . You’re an athlete, you should be eating whole grains, oatmeal, bananas, fish-”

“Dude, get out of my asshole,” Thor huffs, grabbing his bread and throwing it down on the conveyor belt behind all of Loki’s groceries. Without waiting for the pizza-faced cashier to finish ringing up his brother’s groceries, he starts loading the rest of his up onto the belt. “I’m doing just fine on the field, not that I thought you cared or anything.”

“I don’t,” Loki says kind of fast, raising one hand defensively. He pulls out his credit card and waits for the cashier to pronounce his total - $84.83. “I’m just saying, I would have thought you’d have given a little more of a shit than you obviously do.”

“You don’t know anything, Loki,” Thor remarks in a way that manages to sound both incredibly earnest and incredibly insulting. Loki decides not to reply and just rolls off in the direction of the parking lot without waiting for Thor to finish getting rung up, pulling out his phone and his favorite Sudoku app to calm down with while he waits at the car. 

It’s September and he doesn’t care. It’s September and he’s making it through each day on a bar and a half.

Monday morning, it’s September 11th. Celebrating the uniquely American occasion, Thor is playing  _ Call of Duty _ on the Xbox when Loki gets up at 7:00 to have breakfast, tend to the dog, and get ready for his 9:30 Art and Mythology class. Spitting clear water into the sink bowl and shuffling out of the bathroom in his fuzzy socks, Loki peers into the living room and asks, “Did you go to bed last night?”

“No,” Thor answers dully without looking away from his game. His onscreen avatar is predictably blasting some poor virtual soul down with a Desert Eagle, and the gruesome sounds of artificial carnage are not, as expected, really vibing with the whole early morning thing Loki has going on. Loki finger-combs his hair as he pads into the kitchen with Fenris on his heels, moving in the direction of the cabinet with the puppy chow and chewing on what to say.

“Do you have class this morning?” is what finally comes out of his mouth when he opens it, delivered over the clatter of puppy kibble and Fenris’ little snuffling sounds as he pours the food into his bowl.

“At 10:30, yeah,” Thor says in the same dull tone before making a sort of irritated noise and asking, “What’s with the third degree? Are you making breakfast?”

Loki gives the back of Thor’s head an outraged look from the kitchen. “I was just going to make a smoothie.”

Thor, apparently finished with his match, turns to give Loki a very pronounced eye-roll (because let it be known that the two of them are actually at about the same level in maturity most days). “You’re such a girl,” he utters with a groan.

“That’s appallingly sexist,” Loki remarks as he snatches a banana off of the kitchen table and moves over to the refrigerator to retrieve blueberries, kiwis, and vanilla yogurt. All of his ingredients assembled, he puts himself in front of the little bullet blender Mother bought for him at the beginning of the semester and starts to make his smoothie, griping all the while, “I can’t believe Sif actually sleeps with you. She’s this big Girl Power hashtag-feminist but has she ever really respected herself at all?”

Thor looks acutely uncomfortable. “Make bacon and eggs,” he says.

Loki blends, then stops to glare at his brother. “I’m a vegetarian.” He blends again.

“I’ll pay you five dollars!” Thor yells over the cacophony of fruit and yogurt being ground violently together. 

“You can get bacon and eggs from McDonald’s for four bucks!” Loki yells back.

“Yeah, but then I have to get in my car!” Thor hollers.

“A major hazard to everyone,” Loki says at entirely personal volume, then stops blending, his smoothie finished. He procures his favorite long mug from the overhead cabinet. 

“I’ll pay you ten dollars,” Thor says into the newfound silence. “Twenty dollars.”

“Have you considered washing the dishes instead?”

“ _ Ugh _ , just take the money and make breakfast please,” Thor pleads, almost yelling about it.

“Wow, I’d rather drink bleach,” Loki retorts, then makes bacon and eggs anyway while drinking his smoothie, leaving the food on the stove and refusing to serve it before tromping back into his room to get dressed and gather his things for the day. Later, while he’s sitting in his car at a red light on his way to campus, he gets a  _ cha-ching!  _ notification from Venmo. 

  
  


> **Thor Skywalker** paid **loki skywalker** +5.00
> 
> [bacon emoji] [cooking emoji]

  
  


“ _ Fuck you! _ ” Loki screams at his phone, just barely suppressing the urge to throw the thing directly out of the driver’s side window into oncoming traffic. Before class, he makes his ringtone for Thor’s contact “I Hate Everything About You” by Three Days Grace, and fifteen minutes later he’s absolutely killing it academically, answering discussion questions with zeal, engaged in witty repartee with his professor, ignoring when his classmates shoot him dirty looks for his excellence, him a tingly sativa stain on the bright canvas that is Marvel University.

Then, it’s Tuesday. Campus is always kind of gloomy on 9/11, so 9/12 comes around as a smiley afterthought to that, the students, faculty, and staff all suddenly more comfortable with breathing easy and having a generally pleasant time than they were the previous day. Loki is at work at the stroke of ten, helping Amora detangle laptop charger cords and plug them into their respective computers while they await the state of being checked out. By eleven o’clock, the library is whipped up into a frenzy and Loki is thanking his past self for having gotten stoned in the parking garage with Amora before work; thanking his past self for the fingers now massaging his brain as he checks books out to ugly, weirdo freshmen and pretty, polished seniors; thanking his past self for the comforting zing between his shoulder blades; thanking his past self for making work easy and quick. At noon, his high has definitely died down and he’s closer to his normal self than he has ever liked to be. Watching a visually impaired student and his seeing-eye dog amble their way out of the library, Loki feels pooped, vaguely irritated, pillowing his face in his hand with his elbow propped up on his desk. He turns to his computer monitor, pulls up his old mainstay - 247Mahjong.com - and listens to the sounds of Amora assisting a freshie with something trivial at his right, to her sarcastic snicker - “Hemingway. Nice. I’m sure you'll find meaning where countless smarter scholars have not.”

When he isn’t paying attention, someone walks right up to the desk and says to him, “I need help finding a book.”

Loki freezes, knowing this voice and knowing what his reaction to it would be. He desperately wants to say, “That’s not my job,” and run but instead, he turns away from his computer and faces this voice - this uniquely haunting, infuriating voice. “What’s the subject of the book you’re looking for?” he asks, deadpan.

Tony Stark smiles a smile that makes Loki want to retch. “Romance,” he says.

Tony Stark is an Avenger. We all know this much, right? The crown jewel in Marvel University’s big fat fucking tiara, right next to Steve Rogers (resident QB and captain) and Thor Skywalker (the infinitely more glamorous of the team’s two linebackers). Steve Rogers is strictly campus royalty, being rat shit dirt trash from Brooklyn out in the real world; Thor and Tony Stark, on the other hand, are actually real people in the world’s upper echelons. Thor is the son of the biggest architect in Alaska, and Tony is the son of Howard Stark, as in Stark Incorporated. Shall we go along with the history lesson?

In 1979, Howard Stark founded Stark Incorporated to develop and sell the Stark I personal computer. Over the next three decades, Stark Inc. grew in size and rose to become one of the Big Five technology companies, ranked alongside Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Today, on this very campus, there are students walking around with Starkbook laptops and Starkphone smartphones, and they go to class with Tony Stark, attend office hours with Tony Stark, go to football games to watch Tony Stark run across a field, eat lunch in the Student Union with Tony Stark (but only when Tony Stark deigns to dine with normies and poors with meal plans).

“Romance as in the Romantic period-slash-movement would be found all over the third floor,” Loki explains in a droll, even voice that doesn’t even approximate the emotion he’s currently feeling on the inside. He crosses his arms. “If you’re looking for harlequin romance novels, I’m sure a wealthy fellow like yourself can afford a good pdf off of Amazon or the dark web.”

Tony looks alive with pleasure the way he usually did snorting lines off of a vinyl CD case. He grins with a lot of teeth, then asks Loki, “How about a recommendation? You like to read.”

“Oh, wow, excuse me while I go puke,” Loki announces, turning back to his computer and refusing to look at Tony even as Tony stares at him. He contemplates a beautiful Mahjong tile, the beautiful peacock bird that is on this tile. Peacocks are beautiful, but Tony is like a peacock, the way he struts prettily about and demands that everyone lavish their love on him, the beautiful one. Loki closes out of Mahjong and tries hard not to start screaming.

“Listen,” Tony says in a somewhat conspiratorial tone. “I’ve got something to tell you.”

Rudely, Loki asks, “You’ve never heard of a text message?”

“Well, I would have texted you if I thought you’d answer,” Tony replies, not seeming very put out. “I didn’t think you’d answer, and I prefer you reacting to you not reacting.”

Loki, pointedly staring at his desktop on his monitor, at each icon clustered in the upper left corner of the screen, asks, “Who says I’m going to react to you now?”

“I do,” Tony says, smirking, because he fucking knows everything as he has always and will always know everything. Leaning further against the desk, he pronounces, “I’m clean and sober. No drugs, no alcohol. Not even weed.”

Try as he might to not react, Loki can’t help but bug his eyes a little at Tony’s admission, to look at Tony strangely, as if he has flown in through the window and sat on his desk out of spite. “Okay?” he says. “Why do you want me to know?”

“I figured it would make you want to be my friend more when I asked you to be my friend,” Tony replies easily.

Uneasily, Loki says, “That means that you’re under the impression that we’re not friends.”

“Oh, come on, Loki, cut the shit,” Tony demands, then he laughs, and it’s the perfect sound that makes Loki want to kill something soft. “Let’s be friends.” He’s still smirking, but now it’s a sort of soft thing, buttery around the edges. “I’ll take you out to lunch, spoil you, as friends do.”

Loki considers this offer, feeling proud and hungry and very, very borderline. He considers his and Tony’s dueling diagnoses and how deeply violent he feels, how raw and stupid and small. He says, “I’m not going to be free until next month.”

Tony smiles softly, genuinely. “I’d wait years to be your friend.”

That just clicks right in Loki’s ears. He pulls out his phone and looks at his calendar app. “I usually don’t do weekends with anyone but my family,” he says, and there is Tony with his Starkphone, comparing Loki’s with his own calendar, taking notes. Two minutes later, as Tony walks away, Amora hits Loki viciously with her scarf, whisper-yelling, “What! The hell! Is wrong! With you!” with every lick of the fabric.

“I’m not going to go,” Loki says to Amora, not knowing really if he is lying or not. When he leaves work at 1:00 to go to lunch, he takes  _ The World Atlas of Street Food _ with him without checking it out, having spied some cool veggie-friendly recipe in the book that he wanted to try later.

He learns the meaning of regret the next day, on September 13th. He’s at Black Cup with Amora and Namor - their favorite off-campus coffeehouse, their haunt since freshman year when they searched all through Anchorage for the best place to park it where the student traffic was relatively light and the snacks were plentiful. Today, they munch on blueberry muffins the size of their palms and only slightly spotted bananas and drink hazelnut creme roast by the mugful, and while Loki flips through his anthropology text, his friends cook Tony Stark to a crisp in what is obviously a joint manic episode on their parts.

“ _ Kille _ , guess who asked Loki out yesterday?” Amora asks over her psychology textbook, pushing her hair out of her face as she throws her words across the table at Namor.

Namor doesn’t look up from his calculus homework. “Who?”

“Tony Fucking Stark.”

Namor, who is the calmest person Loki knows, suddenly looks enraged. Glaring up from over his textbook, calculator, and notebook, holding his pen like a trident and his head like a crown, he says, “What in the good goddamn hell does Tony Fucking Stark want with our dear Loki, hm, Amora?”

“Oh, you know, the usual things,” Amora pronounces in her sweet Swedish accent, her smirking at Loki and bumping him a little with her elbow. “His bussy, for one.”

“Bussy?” Namor echoes, all confused in the face.

“She means my boy-pussy,” Loki shamefully has to explain. “She means he wants to have sex with me.”

“Well of course he wants to have sex with you, precious,” Namor says in a way that only counts as flustered for him. “He had you once, it’s only natural that he’d want you again.”

“But that piece of shit is taken now,” Amora helpfully pipes in, sounding so irritated and so proud at the same time. “What’s that girl’s name? Ginger, or Spicy…”

“Pepper Potts,” Loki supplies helpfully.

“ _ Pepper Potts _ ,” Amora vomits, holding her hair back off of her neck so that she can properly retch the words into the table. “That girl has been his secretary-slash-best friend-slash-boo thang-slash-mommy since freshman year. It’s so fucking pathetic, I could scream.”

“Who the hell does Tony Fucking Stark think he is?” Namor asks kind of loudly, holding his pen up in the air like a serial killer holds a knife it wants to stab a person with. “What does that fiddling gnome have that even compares to anything Loki has ever done or will ever do?”

“Uh, he’s not  _ that _ short,” Loki complains, knowing that he as a six-foot-three alien freak cannot really judge anyone’s height, as mostly everyone is shorter than the likes of him and Namor. “Also, he got a full ride to MIT. The only reason he came here is because his dad came here back in the day and alumni benefits and all that shit - which, by the way, is the same reason I came here.”

“Blah, blah, blah, the kid’s a fucking cocaine addict with ADHD and a victim complex,” Namor says without missing a beat, sounding angry and insane the way he only does when he’s full-blown manic. “He can get his fucking ass beat if he wants to go out with  _ you _ .”

“Dude, what’s wrong with Tony Stark asking me out?” Loki asks, putting both hands up when Namor and Amora whirl on him at the same time, ready to tear him to shreds. “I’m not about to actually go out with him. I have a little more dignity than that.”

“Good,” Namor huffs. He has a power and a gravitas behind him, just as physical as it is psychic, that is almost overwhelming. His presence is very similar to Thor’s in this way, but Namor is like the sea while Thor is like a storm; they’re both the strongest forces in nature, but at least Namor is calm most of the time, and he actually has depth.

Amora, on the other hand, is the end of the road at the foot of a mountain. She stops up short and there she is, looking Loki in his face with narrowed green eyes and saying, “I don’t believe him.”

“What are you talking about?” Loki asks, trying to sound super casual.

“ _ You! _ ” Amora declares, pointing expansively at Loki. “You are going to go out with Tony Stark and listen to all the little bullshit he’s going to tell you, and you are going to eat it right up!”

“How do you know that?” Loki shoots back defiantly, heedless of the fact that the three of them are currently the loudest presence in Black Cup on a Wednesday afternoon.

“Because he told you he was sober,” Amora replies with an air of victory, emphasizing her answer with a pretty flourish of the fingers. Loki feels that he must only die now.

“Oh,  _ Lord _ , help us all,” Namor groans, turning finally back to his maths and shaking his head, his eyes bugged out wide. “Tony Stark, sober? What brave new world is this?”

“You guys are so mean, and I genuinely love you for it,” Loki says, trying to warm himself over his hazelnut creme coffee and his  _ The Anthropology of Religion _ text. “If I go out with Tony Stark-”

“If!” Amora yells, only stopping at that because Namor is reaching across the table to put his hand atop hers.

“I will keep your cynicism in mind,” Loki finishes, sipping his coffee and patting out a soft drumbeat on the table as an endnote. “I already have enough cynicism on my own. I think I’m good.”

Amora and Namor look at Loki, then at each other. There’s a long moment of silence, then Amora utters a quiet, “Sheesh!” and Namor taps his pen on the tabletop with a sort of finality, him fully engaged back in his homework and the tribunal back in a state of calm. Loki doesn’t know if he plans to keep his lunch date with Tony Stark, but he goes home tonight knowing exactly how the two most important people feel about it.

Monday night, he is slipping into his sleep clothes - his big fuzzy shag-carpety cat sweater and his Catholic schoolgirl plaid shorts, his static electricity wool socks and the perpetual Inuit walrus tooth suspended around his neck. He is padding into the bathroom and grabbing his toothbrush to start his pre-bed ritual, already thinking about the book he’s going to read in bed and the silly  _ Frasier _ episodes he’s going to watch as he’s drifting off to sleep. There’s a problem, though - his toothbrush, for whatever reason, is caked in dried mud.

Loki stares at his toothbrush, this abomination under God. He walks into the living room, where Thor and Sif are sitting around, shooting the shit, sharing a bowl and a couple of beers.

“What the hell happened to my toothbrush?” Loki asks loudly, waving said toothbrush around in the air for emphasis.

Thor looks at him with a sort of faraway quality to his gaze, him mostly not focusing on what he’s looking at before suddenly, he sees Loki and his toothbrush with newfound clarity. He frowns. “Oh, that was  _ your _ toothbrush? I thought it was a spare.”

Loki’s eyes become very wide very fast. “Yeah, Thor, the toothbrush in the fucking toothbrush cup that’s not yours was  _ mine _ , not a spare!” His heart is a fast, bustling, spasming thing in his chest at the moment. “What did you use it for, cleaning your tires?!”

“My boots, actually,” Thor admits casually, smiling, gesturing at his pristine boots near the front door. “Dude, I was high as fuck, I wasn’t thinking at  _ all _ .”

“Come on, you’re trying to get high as fuck now,” Sif urges, passing him the quartz pipe and the American flag/bald eagle lighter they’ve been sharing. She tosses her long black ponytail over her shoulder and gives Loki an apologetic look. “Sorry about your toothbrush, dude.”

Loki thinks he sees red. He drops his toothbrush into the bathroom trash can and goes into his room to text the group chat. Fifteen minutes later, Namor is picking him up in his beautiful BMW that Loki has lusted over since freshman year, because Sleipnir’s battery is being funky and he’s all out of paycheck money for the month. Sliding into the passenger seat in sweatpants and his Docs, he releases a long sigh and says to his very beautiful friend, “You don’t know how much I owe you.”

“Oh, shut up,” Namor says without heat, reversing smoothly out of the complex driveway and turning down the road into Anchorage proper, on their way to Walgreens on Northern Lights Blvd. “I’m not that kind of friend and I really really hope that year three of this friendship doesn’t see you becoming that type of friend either.”

“Of course not,” Loki remarks evenly, putting his face in his hand. “I’m just telling you I want to do sexual favors on you, that’s all.”

Namor laughs - a genuine, sexy laugh. Glancing at Loki for a moment before turning back to the road, he lowers his voice and says, “You’re in sweatpants. You look good.”

“Shut up!” Loki cries, hiding his face even more and laughing raucously into his palms. 

Together, they peruse Walgreens for toothbrushes, deodorant, and Powerade. Loki asks Namor if he’s going to buy him a bag of Sun Chips and Namor dares him to put it on the checkout table. Loki meets his dare fearlessly, munches Sun Chips and drinks Mountain Berry Blast Powerade on his way home in his friend’s impossibly luxe car, and he feels good, and Namor loves him, and he supposes that this is all he needs to cope with his brother’s eternal bullshit. He goes to bed on Monday with his teeth clean, his book beneath his pillow,  _ Frasier  _ streaming in the background, and Fenris a soft and warm pressure against his backside.

On Wednesday, September 20th, it is 45 degrees and Loki is bundled up, sweaterbound with a leather jacket over it all, walking Fenris down the road they live on while a mild Alaska wind whips his Eskimo hair around his head and face. This road is a winding road, full of green that is on the very precipice of beginning to die when October and November arrive. One-story houses with two-car garages line both sides of this road, with the fantastic exception of the cream yellow two-story house right next to the apartment complex, a house meant to be inhabited by a whole extended family at least, beautiful and looking like the architectural version of a butter cake. Loki takes all of this in while Fenris sniffs and bounds about in front of him all the way down the road, looking for his right spot to do his business. While Fenris seeks, Loki remembers the road he used to live on - the Asgard subdivision in the land of milk and honey, Odin and Frigga Skywalker’s house on A Street situated forty-five degrees from the great fucking gulf of Alaska. Their New Traditional Victorian house with the same cream yellow siding as the house on the current street, their big den and the animal furs and deer heads posted everywhere, gaudy as fuck but still so perfect. This was the way Odin and Frigga (mostly Odin) liked things. They liked flowers in their dining room and the bearskin rug in the den. 

Loki remembers having pets as a kid. His mother’s cats that he sort of adopted as his own, Turkish Angoras and Maine Coons. Odin’s dogs that both he and Thor doted on, perfect Great Danes and purebred Norwegian Elkhounds. When he was in high school, he finally got a pet of his own - a rare color ball python named Jormungandr, who he loved dearly and who Thor had such a strange, unhealthy fixation with. One weekend when everything had gone, as it often did, so fucking wrong between them, Thor had taken Jormungandr out of his climate-controlled enclosure and thrown him into the wintry Alaskan backyard, and the next day, after Loki had torn up the house and cried like a bitch looking for his beloved python, Thor had told him what he’d done and offtered a lukewarm sorry and a mozzarella cheese stick, and oh they had warred then. Oh, Loki had coughed all over Thor’s toothbrushes and spit in his shampoo bottles. Maybe the toothbrush thing was revenge for that, Loki reflects as he watches Fenris squat and shit. Picking up the puppy turds with a Carrs grocery bag and walking the half-mile down the road back home, he feels sort of irritated about all of this, about having a brother with which to feud ad nauseum.

He walks into the house with Fenris and there is Thor with Fandral, Volstagg, and Hogun, three out of the four of them all yelling at each other and drinking something alcoholic. Fenris immediately starts barking, sort of frightened and excited by the energy in the room, and Loki just scoops his puppy into his arms and hightails it for his room, saying, “Calm down. He’s not leaving no matter how much we’re just dying for him to.”

The next day, the craziest thing Loki has ever seen happen happens. In the mid-afternoon, Thor and Fandral are fighting over a bag of beef jerky in the kitchen while Sif sits on the kitchen counter and laughs her guttural, husky laugh. They’re all in the house on the pretense that they’re “studying on a Thursday”, but really they’re just being as obnoxious and loud as possible, and Loki is trying to get a bowl of Corn Pops without losing his shit but of course, they’re right there to challenge that. 

“Hey, kitten,” Fandral purrs. Loki throws optic daggers at him and scurries out of the room amongst the laughter of Thor and Sif, them pawing cutely at each other near the microwave, them nearly kissing.

Later that night, the sounds of coitus ring throughout the apartment. Loud, manlike screaming and the insistent rhythm of headboard against drywall. Loki, of course, can’t stand it. It’s Thursday night, he has a quiz in his Anthropology of Religion class tomorrow morning, and being that the alternative to burning the house down with Thor and Sif in it is simply tolerating this hell, Loki decides to take a long shower and hope beyond hoping that the lovemaking has died down by the time he gets out of the bathroom.

Thirty minutes later, he is coming out of his shower in his Garfield sweatshirt and boxer-briefs and he sees not Sif in the living room, but Valkyrie Saint-Claire with Thor’s boxers and no shirt on - Valkyrie, his long-time classmate as the one of six other religious studies majors at Marvel University and Thor’s long-time friend/sexual partner, picking Thor’s quartz pipe and his little baggie of Runtz up off of the table, her bronze skin and her silky black hair shining in the lamplight. Loki realizes like a car accident that it wasn’t Sif that Thor was fucking minutes earlier - it was  _ Valkyrie Saint-Claire _ , and without thinking he’s beelining directly into his room without saying a word or making a sound, shutting his door after him as quietly as he can.

Last year, Thor dated Sif, Valkyrie Saint-Claire, and Jane Foster the fellow astrophysics major with great hair on and off. This was an Alzheimer’s-worthy, labyrinthine tangle where Thor hopped between alternating relationships with Sif and Jane while being best friends with Valkyrie, then eventually started sleeping with Valkyrie without ever establishing an official relationship with her due to his other attachments and Valkyrie's ever-present commitment issues. Eventually the summer came and the slate became wiped clean or something like that, because now Sif is friends with Thor again, Jane Foster is doing great somewhere out there in Marvel University, and Valkyrie Saint-Claire is sleeping with Thor on a Thursday night. Loki texts the group chat.

  
  


> **Today** 9:42 PM
> 
> **loki skywalker  
>  ** thor is sleeping with valkyrie again… how much you want to bet it’s going to go fantastically wrong before the end of next month?
> 
> **namor mckenzie  
>  ** That’s insane. Valkyrie is so amazing and so much better than your brother in every way; I don’t understand why this happens every year.
> 
> **loki skywalker  
>  ** I KNOW RIGHT… i really hate this because i know sif’s going to get so hurt [disappointed face emoji]
> 
> **amora akerman  
>  ** What about Thor? [thinking face emoji]
> 
> **loki skywalker  
>  ** what about him? he’s going to get caught up in his own crazy storm and get blitzed, literally, and then come out on the other side a bachelor of science who everyone loves
> 
> **amora akerman  
>  ** But who will he be with? That’s the sad part… [disappointed face emoji]
> 
> **namor mckenzie  
>  ** Amora, it’s fine. Thor will be fine and we’ll all be together, which is where we belong.
> 
> **loki skywalker  
>  ** retweet
> 
> **amora akerman  
>  ** [green heart emoji]

  
  


Then it is Friday, September 22nd. It is in the mid-forties in the sort of frenzied dead zone that exists on campus in the middle of the afternoon. Loki and Namor hang out in the quad in front of the library, both bundled up in wool (Namor’s got this really stupidly expensive Italian crepe sweater on that Loki just wants to roll up and die in) and leather. Namor, for reasons that always manage to escape them, has his arm casually draped around Loki’s shoulder while they sit on the wrought iron bench and people-watch.

They spy Dr. Endwi Gast, Loki’s long-time religious studies professor in his turquoise bathrobe-looking coat and his mood rings, his silver hair a carefully coiffed mess atop his head. Gast walks from Ditko Hall, the big humanities building, up the steps and into the library with a sort of aimless ferocity to him, and Loki has to roll his eyes a little and say, “My professor is such a faggot, Namor.”

“Who?” Namor asks, turning his head a little and probably squinting at the front of the library, not that Loki can tell on the other side of his sunglasses. “That professor that looks like he’s homeless and running an alternative sex shop in New Orleans? That man with the loud robe who just walked into the library and nearly bumped into that honors kid with multiple sclerosis? Killian, I think his name is?”

Sure enough, Aldritch Killian the multiple sclerosis wonder is stumbling out of the library with his arms full of textbooks. Loki snorts and remarks. “Dr. Gast. He’s so crazy and I’m like eighty-three percent sure he’s trying to sleep with me every time I go in for office hours.”

“You could do a lot better than him,” Namor admits like it pains him, not moving his arm from around Loki’s shoulders. He smells like pricey cologne, like a real man, kind of like Father if Loki’s being honest with himself. Loki, on the other hand, just smells like old books and the Starbucks coffee he’s been sipping on for the past five minutes or so. He surreptitiously leans in to sniff Namor’s neck, then continues to watch Marvelites do their five o’clock dance in, around, and off campus. 

There’s Carol Danvers, one of the three lady Avengers and a frequent classmate of Loki’s due to her anthropology major, which coincidentally happens to overlap with the religious studies major a lot more than one would think. She’s walking tall and proud with her vegan leather backpack and her best friend, Maria Rambeau, and Loki can tell that she’s making a joke because of the sort of devilish look on her face and the way Maria is already rolling her eyes before the words are even finished coming out of Carol’s mouth. Carol has these really nice boots that Loki has always envied on - pure red Doc Martens with black soles, laced with yellow laces. Loki is more a fan of green, truth be told, but he’s always eaten his own heart out at these perfect wearers of red like his brother and Carol Danvers. He sips his coffee and looks away from the boots.

“Ooh, look, it’s the Kenyan exchange students,” Namor intones, and when Loki looks up, there they are with their beautiful box braids and styled afros, their vibrant September clothing with sharp geometrical motifs and the fur and ivory genuine, in all likelihood. T’Challa Udaku is at the fore of the group, him also an Avenger and possibly one of the smartest people at Marvel U barring his sister who walks by his side - Shuri, the aspiring roboticist and frequent runner in Tony Stark’s circles. Loki feels small in the presence of such excellence, at this throng of beautiful black bodies strolling across the campus in the direction of the student union. 

“I wonder if they’re vegetarian,” he wonders aloud.

“What makes you think that?” Namor asks.

“They’re really beautiful, cool, smart people,” Loki replies. He brings his coffee to his lips and takes a long sip. “It would just make sense for them to be dope vegetarians, too.”

Namor hums lowly. “You want to be friends with them.”

“The same way I want to be friends with any celebrity,” Loki clarifies, clearing his throat and watching the international students disappear into the student union. He turns to Namor with an even look on his face. “How are you today, man?”

“Kind of depressed,” Namor admits delicately, scratching the corner of his mouth idly, with an almost feline quality to him. “I was really killing it earlier this week with the mania. Amora said I was talking faster than your guy on coke.”

“Tony Stark is not my guy,” Loki insists. 

“You say that now,” Namor says somewhat ominously. He turns to observe the Maximoff twins walking side-by-side in the direction of Lee Hall, their hair skunk-streaked silver, their entire aura smelling of clove cigarettes and patchouli. He gazes for a while at Wanda Maximoff’s sparkly red sweater, it alternately the prettiest and the ugliest thing Loki has ever seen, before looking back at Loki over the top of his sunglasses and asking, “You want to come home with me? Amora wants to go out for dinner tonight and I’m sure she’d love to see you.”

“No, man…” Loki puts down his phone and his coffee and looks at Namor with his whole brown face. “Just stay with me here. I like judging people with you.”

Namor smiles. At Wanda Maximoff, he says, “JCPenny’s called, they want their sweater back. They’ve got Claire’s on the line looking for the sparklies.”

Loki laughs and downs the rest of his coffee. When Dr. Gjallarhorn with his brilliant dreadlocks and brilliant British sweater comes strolling in front of them on his way to the library, Loki makes an excited noise in the back of his throat and gestures to the professor with his hand holding his phone. “Look, it’s Amora’s favorite guy on campus. One day I’ll get his number for her and she’ll owe me her life.”

Namor rubs Loki’s shoulder through his leather jacket and his sweater. “I think she’s more interested in his social and some nudes, if you know what I mean. Amora doesn’t really date people - she just stalks them until they realize they’re hers.”

“I love her,” Loki comments, then pulls up his text messages with her and sends her row after row of green hearts.

Next Friday, the last one of the month, the Skywalkers go out to dinner. The place is Fletcher’s, several blocks from home, so they can eat oysters and calamari and garlic artichoke dip and Alaskan halibut. Mother arranges for them all to sit at the best table in the house in nice cashmere sweaters and tasteful denim pants, and as Loki quietly thanks her for choosing a restaurant he can actually eat at, Father dives into the conversation with both feet on the ground, asking Thor, “So, son, you ready for football?”

“Oh, yeah,” Thor replies, his long blond tresses shining in the golden light hanging overhead. He smiles at the waitress pouring clear water into a glass for him, and the waitress nearly falls over, and Loki could just gag. “These first weeks of practice have been pretty great. I think this is going to be a good last season for me.”

“Oh, it better be,” Father says from behind his great white Christmassy beard. “I remember when I was an Avenger,” he starts to say, and Loki knows that remembering is big in their household, but for some reason when Father does it he can’t quite stand it, can’t quite stand the constant comparisons being done between his and his father’s and his sons’ and daughters’ generations. “My last season was glorious. You should cherish this time that you have.”

“I’m trying to,” Thor admits. Loki knows what this means, knows that “cherishing the time” means getting plastered every night and trying to top every last woman- or ball-shaped conquest with the next similarly woman- or ball-shaped conquest. He thinks about Valkyrie and Sif and feels a little guilty for knowing so much that could cause such heartbreak, but instead of saying anything, he just munches on his spicy calamari with red pepper aioli and watches Mother silently pick lint off of Father’s blazer.

“How’s this semester shaping up?” Father asks over his glass of water.

“For both of you,” Mother adds at his right. Loki just barely resists the urge to roll his eyes.

“It’s pretty hard, but in an okay way,” Thor says, and then, because he’s actually a genius, he throws a dismissive hand in the air and adds, “Gravitational wave physics is kind of challenging, but I like my Astrophysics class and I’m taking this really cool class about feasts in history and all that.”

“‘ _ Gravitational wave physics is kind of challenging _ ,’” Loki echoes mockingly, popping calamari into his mouth and staring meaningfully at the table. Thor looks at him hard, this sort of confused expression on his face, as if he wonders where in the world his brother became so mean.

“You do flatter me, Loki,” he says. “I can just feel the love radiating off of you in waves.”

“Don’t use such big words, Thor,” Loki shoots back easily, thinking of his puppy dog waiting for him at home. “It’s too becoming,”

“What big words?” Thor asks. “ _ Radiating _ ?”

“ _ Flatter _ ,” Loki replies.

“Boys,” Mother chimes in, looking ready to paddle someone with a bamboo rod.

“Listen to your mother,” Father says immediately, knowing Mother hasn’t really said anything, his interjection almost thoughtless in that way. He looks at Thor from across the table, him sitting tall and proud like Carol Danvers walked across campus last Friday, and his severe, transatlantic voice is on the verge of loud when he asks, “Do you think you will be magna cum laude?”

Thor suddenly looks cocky. “Oh, I don’t know about that, but I’ll see if I can pencil it in.”

“You seem awfully arrogant,” Father observes. Loki wants to ask when Thor  _ isn’t _ arrogant.

“I think I kind of have the right to be,” Thor says, smiling over his peppercorn crusted ribeye steak and looking so smart and mean in his nice crimson button-down shirt. “I’m probably the smartest senior at Marvel right now.”

“In a purely mathematical sense,” Loki cannot help but put in.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Thor asks, finally looking not merely confused, but also irritated.

“There are so many levels to what I said and I’m not even going to explain them,” Loki replies, then starts looking around for the waitress so Mother can order him a glass of red wine.

“Have you guys talked to your sister recently?” Mother asks by way of neutralizing the acidity of the conversation, her smile at least a little forced at the mention of Hela - her wicked stepdaughter and the blacker of the two black sheep in the family.

“No,” Loki and Thor say at the exact same time, Loki feeling humorous and Thor seeming almost offended at having to think about Hela whenever he wasn’t expressly prepared to.

“You should give her a call,” Father says for some reason Loki can’t quite identify. He chews his halibut carefully but violently, something sharklike in his manner of eating. “I’m sure she’d love to hear from you, you know, with her birthday coming up next month.”

Loki is certain that nothing could be farther from the truth. Mother looks sold on the idea though, and Thor just appears plain vexed, so maybe there is something to the idea of giving his half-adopted sister a ring.

After dinner, Mother has Thor, Loki, and Father stand in front of the restaurant with their arms around each other so that she can take a photograph with her smartphone. Loki endures this with his blandest smile on his face, because as much as he has believed for the past forever that he is not part of this family, she is his mother and for her he would do anything. Later, he is in bed scrolling through his Facebook feed and he sees this photo has been made Odin Skywalker’s profile picture, only he has been cropped out while Thor and Father remain. He stares at this for four going on five minutes before screenshotting it and sending it to the group text.

  
  


> **Today** 10:13 PM
> 
> **loki skywalker  
>  ** i was in this photograph before it was cropped, you can see my ear right there next to thor
> 
> am i fucking hallucinating
> 
> **amora akerman  
>  ** Aaa Thor looks so cute here [smiling face with hearts emoji] I bet you looked cute too!
> 
> **namor mckenzie  
>  ** Wow. Go families, right?
> 
> **loki skywalker  
>  ** #littleadopteethings #littleeskimothatcouldthings

  
  


Loki laughs, and goes to bed feeling like shit. It’s September and he doesn’t care. It’s September and he’s making it through each day on a bar and a half.


	3. OCTOBER

#  _ OCTOBER _

Football season is amping up. All of a sudden most people on campus are talking about homecoming and tailgating and watching the flawless Avengers prance and sprint across a green field, and Loki couldn’t be any less interested in all of the frivolity. He just kind of tolerates it when Amora comes to hang out in the quad wearing a Marvel U football jersey (hoping someone on the team, preferably Thor, will recognize her school spirit and make out with her for three hours as a reward). “At least you kind of rock it,” Loki remarks to Amora as she sits down with him with her hydroflask in her hand, looking gorgeous and collegiate in her brown leather jacket and her big red Marvel U jersey and her skinny jeans and her steel-toed boots.

“ _ Älskling _ , I rock everything,” Amora declares, giving Loki a sort of a bow before sipping on her iced coffee and pulling her laptop out of her bag. “You should get in the spirit of things. Your brother is a football player, after all.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m just bursting at the seams,” Loki remarks sarcastically. He stares insistently at the ghetto gold jewelry strung around Amora’s neck in thin chains, at her set of rings on her left hand, and he loves her, he really does, despite everything that makes her strange and bad.

The second day of October, Thor gets fired from his job in the math lab for getting in a fight with a student named Ulik, who doesn’t and refuses to learn how to FOIL. The crack of Thor’s great fist against Ulik’s strong nose and jaw spell disaster for Thor’s job, and he is summarily terminated from the program after four years of being kind of perfect there. Loki supposes it’s for the better anyway - now Thor has even more time to practice football every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoon and come home to get drunk and fucked up with his friends and eventually go on to sleep with Valkyrie either in his bed or on his phone, and that’s sweet. That’s just the way life has to be right now, Loki thinks.

Also on the day Thor gets fired from the math lab, Loki reads Nabokov in the living room in a rare moment when neither Thor nor his friends are habiting the space. It is Monday night, so Thor and the posse (or Thor and Valkyrie?) are out pub-crawling in Anchorage, leaving Loki to bask happily in the vacant space of his house, in this unique moment where he can be himself without being surveilled or having to surveill others. He is halfway through  _ Pale Fire _ when his phone begins to ring where it sits on the coffee table next to his pipe. Glancing at the screen, Loki just barely keeps himself from retching or screaming when  _ hela skywalker _ shows up on the caller ID - he had no real plans of when he was going to call his sister, but he was hoping he’d be the one to reach out first. He and Hela are kind of competitive like that.

“Hello?” he says into his phone in the most featureless voice he can manage.

“How was dinner with the family?” comes asking Hela’s sleek, silvery voice that is all sharp around the edges. “Father didn’t make you try the steak again, did he? That was such a funny time when that happened.”

“It’s nice to hear from you too, Hela,” Loki delivers in a deceptively chipper tone. “I just love our chats - they’re just so great.”

From 1991 to 1992, while between relationships with Frigga and other women not very much of note, Odin Skywalker was locked in a turbulent relationship with a fellow (definitely subservient) employee at Asgard - a relationship that resulted in Hela, who was born out of wedlock. Odin was this baby girl’s daddy for two blissful years before he reunited with and married Frigga Vanir in 1994, who swiftly gave birth to Thor and stole him away from his first almost-family. For thirteen years, Hela waited for him to come back home, only to have turned bitter and blackened by fire by the time he finally came back to her when she was a fifteen year old with braces and piercing blue eyes, with freckles, with bruised knees. Growing up, from the time Loki was twelve, Hela inhabited their lives like a stranger while Father tried in his own way to be a good dad and unite the family beneath his flag; Hela was, however, justifiably a huge bitch to her half-brothers, resenting them for being her father’s sons so much more than she was his daughter.

Nowadays, Loki loves Hela for her one-of-a-kind hatred of their father, but Hela exists as she has always existed - as his dark, black sister with her streak of raven hair, hating him and hating everything but still managing to be one of Loki’s only friends. It’s weird how things work out like that.

“It’s really fun listening to you use positive, generic words like ‘great’ and ‘nice’,” Hela remarks evenly. “They’re so unlike everything you are.” Loki wonders idly if she’s still in her office at Asgard at this time, because Hela has never really had a personal life that existed fully outside the confines of her work.

Instead of saying all that, though, he tries to cut to the chase, because he likes talking to his sister except when it’s exhausting and it’s really about to get exhausting in T-minus three seconds. “What do you want, Hela? I plan on getting you a bottle of wine for your birthday at the end of this month so jot that down.”

“Christ, you’re really surgical today,” Hela notes, and Loki can see her looking at her manicure in his mind’s eye, can see her severe black makeup around her watery blue eyes. “I just wanted to see how dinner was. I saw Daddy cropped you out of the family photograph.”

“Oh, that’s nothing,” Loki says with a huff.

“I know, right? I wasn’t even invited to dinner, so I couldn’t have been cropped out of the picture at all!” Hela has a genuine cheer to her voice, something burned into her after so many years of abandonment and resentment. “I love our family,” she says happily.

“Oh my  _ God _ , talking to you is so hard,” Loki says very honestly, widening his eyes at the ceiling and sort of praying for an accident to happen that will pull him off of the phone. “Dinner was fine, Thor and I didn’t even really argue this time, and Father was in a good mood so everything went well. Truth be told, you would have ruined it.”

“I know I would have. It makes me almost regret choosing that day to go to the gym with Skurge.”

“What, your assistant-slash-boytoy-slash-white slave?” Loki asks.

“Skurge is my assistant,” Hela insists. “He assists me when I need help.”

“Sexually?” 

“If need be.” Hela sounds very proud of herself saying this, and it makes Loki realize for maybe the grillionth time how fucked up and horrible his sister truly is.

“What did you do at the gym?” Loki asks casually, bookmarking his novel and setting it down on the table in exchange for his pipe. “I haven’t seen your legs in awhile-”

“They look great, I promise,” Hela interjects smartly. “I mostly did cardio this time, which you know Skurge loves because it gets me all wet-”

“I really hate the kind of person you are,” Loki blurts without thinking.

“I know!” Hela says, then laughs her deep, baritone laugh that almost doesn’t fit her, coming out of her lithe and delicate body. She, like all Skywalkers, has a gravitas and a palpable willpower about her, but her ethereal beauty contrasts with how hard she is; the sort of igneous, granite presence she has. “I hate the kind of person I am too. That’s kind of what being our father’s child is like.”

Loki has to reflect that she is right in a way. He nods to himself and makes a soft noise of acknowledgement, thinking of the best way to end this conversation before mere exposure to his sister pushes him past the boundaries of sanity.

“I was reading,” he says, deciding honesty is the best way to go. “I really wasn’t in the mood to talk.”

“Oh, you think because you’re in college you’re some busy little person with no time for their family,” is Hela’s long-winded reply, delivered with a breathy note of disappointment. “You know, Father is the only one I actually spend time with anymore, and that’s because we work together. We never have family time. I know your mother likes to call you because that’s her thing, but she was never really  _ my _ mother, you know? I don’t have family phone calls.”

“And that’s all you’ve ever wanted, isn’t it?” Loki observes without much chilliness. 

“Maybe so,” Hela replies, sounding thoughtful. “Go read your book, little boy. I won’t keep you away from what you really want.”

“Thanks, Hela,” Loki says earnestly, already ready with his bowl of Strawberry Cough packed and his pipe in his dominant left hand. “Sometimes, you’re really the best sister ever.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Hela says, then summarily hangs up without a word of goodbye. Loki thanks the universe that things are so easy for him sometimes.

On Monday, October 9th, it is Amora’s birthday. Birthdays are kind of big in their collective friendship, being that they value luxury as well as the tangible benchmarks signifying their increasing maturity as much as they do. Loki, Amora, and Namor celebrate at the Akerman-McKenzie residence - a modest apartment in Nunaka Valley with modern finishings and a 32-inch flatscreen TV; Loki brings his tarot deck so Amora can read his fortune and Namor makes sure they’re well-stocked in the alcohol department. 

“Witches Brew!” Amora cries as soon as Loki comes in the door, holding a jade green gift bag and his multicolor infinity scarf in his hands. She throws her own hands up in the air, making grabby gestures with them as Loki approaches her to give her a kiss on the right cheek. “We’re making Witches Brew,” she announces to her bestie, her eyes almost wild with enthusiasm. “You want the first sip?”

“It won’t be the first sip of alcohol period,” Namor notes from where he stands in the kitchen, nursing a bottle of Zinfandel like it’s a sippy cup. He looks boozy, comfortable, and Loki knows for fairly certain that Namor is an alcoholic by the way he drinks before it’s even hit four o’clock in the afternoon like athletes and students casually sip water bottles and Starbucks coffee in class. Loki smiles a loving smile.

“I’ll take the first sip of Witches Brew,” he says, then hands Amora her gift. “ _ Happy birthday, A-mora _ ,” he sings, putting his hands in her pretty blond hair and tousling it into a lovely mess. “ _ Happy birthday, A-mora _ .”

Without waiting to ask if it’s appropriate or not, Amora tears the tissue paper out of her gift bag and procures the present inside - a big honking candle the scent of spearmint and jasmine and the shape of a woman’s voluptuous torso. “Oh my God!” Amora cries, running to the end table next to the living room sofa to gingerly place the candle down and light it with her sparkly pink Bic. She takes a good whiff off of it once the wick is good and burning. “That shit is  _ fire _ ,” she says with a grin.

Loki taps his nose with his index finger. “The nose knows,” he quips.

In the kitchen, they dance to Lorde and Joy Division and assemble the ingredients for their old standard, Witches Brew: blue curacao by the bottle and half a gallon of orange juice. Amora is twenty-one, and it seems strange to celebrate her newfound legal drinking by drinking what they’ve been whipping up since they were freshman, but nobody really complains when the bitter tang of Witches Brew is just so appetizing and the night, though Monday, feels so sweet. When Loki considers himself properly buzzed, he sits on the living room floor with Amora and the hookah in front of him, picking tarot cards from a face-down deck. Amora rubs her hands together as she flips each picked card over and explains what their presence means for Loki.

“Ooh, The Tower for your past,” Amora gushes, shaking her head and grimacing. “Bad, bad card…”

“That one’s pretty self-explanatory,” Loki remarks, sipping his Witches Brew from the cup in his left hand and twirling the hookah pipe in his right. 

“You’ll have to explain for me,” Namor says from where he sits on the sofa with his drink and a joint in his hand. 

“The Tower means sudden upheaval and chaos,” Amora elaborates, fluffing her blond waves out over her shoulders and, for some reason, messing with her boobs. Pushing them together so that her cleavage is at its most appetizing, she looks at Namor and says, “Your whole life comes crashing down when The Tower comes to play.”

“What do you think it means?” Namor asks. Loki thinks of Thor’s face, shattered windshields, alcohol breath; he shrugs.

“Could be anything,” he lies.

The reversed Nine of Swords is his present card. Loki nearly laughs out loud at the bleakness of his spread so far; instead, he just throws his hand with his drink in the air and cries, “Cheers!”, then sucks sweet vapor out of the hookah pipe until the contraption bubbles ominously. 

“Reversed Nine of Swords - deep inner turmoil, downward spiral,” Amora explains, looking tragic and somewhat frenzied at having to deliver such a hard fortune. “Your thoughts are way, way in the shitter right now, and you can’t quite reach your fullest potential in the state you’re in.”

"Tell me something I don't know," Loki says with a sigh, trying and failing to ignore the way Namor watches him like he is the most dreadfully sad creature of all. Wincing beneath the energy of his friend's stare, he whines, "Please stop looking at me, just show me my future card and let me live with my pain."

Amora frowns severely, stealing the hookah pipe from Loki to take a drag herself, and flips over Loki’s third card. “Six of Cups,” she pronounces, looking relieved. “Childhood memories, innocence, revisiting the past.”

Loki stares at this card, at the children printed in their red hats and with their star flowers on the expensive cardstock. He’s not sure what emotion he feels in reaction to his fortune; sipping his Witches Brew, he gives Amora an ambiguously pleased look and says, “Well, I’ll update you in a couple of months to tell you if you’re right.”

“I’m always right,” Amora says immediately, looking at Namor as if for confirmation. Namor, who is cherrying his joint really hard at the moment, just nods a little and looks fucking friendly and crossfaded, and that’s all any of them want to be on such a glorious day as this. Amora puffs on the hookah, reads her own glaringly positive tarot, and declares herself queen of the world, and Loki and Namor just laugh and clink their glasses together and enjoy their Monday night.

Tuesday passes strangely. Loki comes into his Science of Sexual Orientation class at 8:30 in the morning feeling ill-prepared and irritated, and the first thing he has to see is Tony Stark smiling at him, asking him, “You ready for lunch tomorrow?”

Feeling alternately soothed and put off by Tony’s eagerness, Loki smiles blankly over his thermos of green tea and says, “As I’ll ever be.” Tony turns back to Maya Hansen and Loki goes on to sit in his seat at the front of the classroom, sleepy and hungover and wondering how in the hell he’s actually going to do tomorrow without alcohol or drugs. He resolves to smoke a bowl before going to lunch at noon, and that’s exactly what he’s doing at 11:30 before driving off to the restaurant, lighting up Peanut Butter and Jelly and getting a little blazed before he has to sit across from Tony Stark for an hour or however long Tony decides to keep him. This is how he’s going to get through this friendship, he realizes - with lots of fucking weed.

They lunch at Jen’s Restaurant, a really fancy, kind of old-ish place in Loki’s native part of Anchorage. Tony arrives first, and Loki doesn’t know how he feels about Tony’s punctuality and his sudden zeal for being a good person and a good friend, whether this makes him more or less comfortable with the prospect of their friendship. Tony isn’t so obnoxious or polite as to pull Loki’s chair out for him, but he waits until Loki is sitting down to sit down himself, to smile and let Loki order a screwdriver and take a look at the appetizer menu before ordering himself a virgin piña colada, because apparently October is the time for that sort of thing. “You can get anything you want,” he comments offhandedly while Loki squints at pictures of fresh Alaskan oysters and grilled lamb lollipops. Loki very nearly growls.

“I forgot how crazy rich you are,” Loki remarks, thinking of Tony’s billions off in his bank account somewhere in cyberspace, the nice house he’s probably renting in northern Anchorage for him and James Rhodes. He points his index at the seafood crepe. “That looks really good actually.”

“Well here, let me get the waitress,” Tony offers, and before he can raise his hand and his voice in the air, Loki is shaking his head sharply.

“Just wait, just wait. She’ll be back with my screwdriver in like five minutes anyway.”

Instead of being difficult as he would have been before, Tony just calms down and smiles at Loki, looking healthy and happy in a way that is rare for the richest guy on campus. He doesn’t look at his own menu (Loki remembers all at once that Tony doesn’t really eat all that much, strangely enough), just looks at his lunch companion and asks, “What was that about my riches?”

“You can walk into the bougiest restaurant in any city in the world and just be like, ‘order anything you want.’” Loki is mostly deadpan with Tony (he’s almost always been mostly deadpan), but in this moment, his amazement shines through to his expression for just a moment. “How is that not the craziest thing ever? Do you realize how special that is?”

“You grew up rich too, kid,” Tony says, smirking a little.

“Not rich like you,” Loki argues, shaking his head. “Not  _ my-father-has-billions _ rich. I’m just a big person in this part of the world. You could literally own the planet if you wanted to.”

“Aw, how’d you discover my secret plan?” Tony asks in a way that manages to straddle the line of humorous and just plain sincere. “Now you know why I’m a member of Future Leaders of America.”

“Are you going to run for president?” Loki asks, feeling cheeky.

“Only if you’re my VP,” Tony retorts.

Loki has to laugh, his composure temporarily broken. This is what Tony Stark does to him. The feeling that accompanies kindergarten shenanigans in the schoolyard, games of hide-and-seek with the coolest kid you’ve ever met in your life - that’s the same feeling that comes with messing around with Tony, except it’s unbearably sexy and very likely to end in injury.

“So,” Tony says, a note of transition in his tone. He looks at Loki with open kindness, with open longing. “I missed you, man. Where’ve you been?”

Loki has to remind himself suddenly to be on his guard. “Jupiter,” is his even reply. He sips at the complementary water the waitress has poured for him. 

“Care to tell me about that?” Tony asks, genuine and arresting. 

“To be honest, I’d rather hear about you,” Loki says, pushing for dirt he can deliver to Namor and Amora and agonize about by himself in the wee hours of the morning between homework and sleep. “How has life been for Tony Stark?”

“Jeeze.” Tony emits a low whistle. “I’m a junior now and I’m an Avenger so everything’s really busy, you know. Football practice and all that. You should come one afternoon, hang out and tease your brother.”

“What is it with you and my brother?” Loki asks without thinking, sort of smiling.

“I don’t know, man, it’s just - he’s all muscle, no brain.” Tony is smirking, shaking his head, and it’s bothering Loki so much and he doesn’t know why.

“Thor’s actually really smart,” Loki states simply, it being a fact.

“In a purely mathematical sense,” Tony replies perfectly. It is the second time Loki laughs in his presence today, him unable to help himself at this perfect utterance of what he said not very many weeks ago.

Their drinks and appetizers come around. Tony explains to Loki his life as a sober man, his refusal to preach at the church of Alcoholics Anonymous but his steadfast dedication to sobriety nonetheless. He sort of talks around his relationship, and Loki respects that up until the moment Tony sort of fiddles with his sunglasses atop his head and looks at Loki out the side of his eyes and asks, “Is it okay to talk about Pepper? I didn’t want to just start talking about her and make you uncomfortable.”

Loki, thinking of the exact moment when Tony told him just before the semester started that he and Pepper were a “real item”, that they were “really going to try to make it work this time”, nods his head and doesn’t smile, but makes his expression open, receptive. “Go ahead. I don’t mind.”

Tony grins. “Great. It’s good that we can talk about this. Friends talk about their relationships.”

“Yep,” Loki agrees.

“If you ever get in a relationship-”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen after what went on between us.”

Tony’s expression changes, turning confused and innocent. “What do you mean?”

Loki abruptly wants to stutter and go to the bathroom and escape from the restaurant, but instead of doing all that, he just looks briefly at the ceiling and finds some way to explain himself. “I’m just not a relationship person, Tony. You are, obviously. That’s why things didn’t work out between us.”

Tony still looks so innocent, and it makes Loki want to punch him between the eyes. “Things didn’t work out between us because you didn’t live in New York.”

“Among so many other reasons,” Loki utters with a sigh.

Tony looks like he wants to smile. “I feel like you’re teasing me.”

“Please talk about Pepper,” Loki pleads without sounding too desperate. “Or anything not involving me, please.”

Tony watches him for a moment, surveilling him, observing him as a scientist observes a wild animal, but then he’s calm and friendly again, pronouncing that, “Pepper is great. Well, she and I are great. I really feel like I’ve finally settled down and found the person I belong with, like my dad did with my mom.”

Every word is a dagger in Loki’s heart. This past summer, Tony flew him out to Long Island to spend two weeks of fun and luxury with him. Over the course of the fortnight, they dined and danced and slept together, two genius borderlines tangling their legs together the way only they knew how to do, and for the rest of the summer, they texted and called each other incessantly, romantic but not in a Facebook official relationship. The last week of the summer, Tony called Loki on a Thursday night to tell him he and Pepper Potts were a “real item,” thus breaking his heart and putting their entire relationship in jeopardy. All of this rings through Loki’s head while he nods and smiles and says, “That’s great,” about fucking Pepper Potts and Tony Stark, picking the mushrooms out of his seafood crepe and popping them into his mouth with his pristine fucking fork.

“I feel like all I do around you is talk about myself,” Tony comments, and Loki wants to laugh at the absurd rightness of his statement. He sips his piña colada and gestures expansively to Loki with his hand not holding his drink. “I want to hear about  _ you _ . All you do is hide yourself.”

“I can’t help it when the other personalities in the room are so loud,” Loki says, deflecting as always. “You literally picked a fight with Dr. Rogg yesterday in the middle of me trying to answer his discussion question about sex, and I know you would pick a fight with a squirrel if it looked at you wrong-”

“I’m just opinionated, dude,” Tony argues, looking a little outraged. “Plus, you’re evading me.”

“Sorry,” Loki breathes, shaking his head and munching on Alaskan seafood. “I don’t like it when people actually see me for who I am.”

“Why not?” Tony asks, looking serious and interested in the answer. “You’re pretty great when you’re just being yourself, even if you are completely fucking bonkers.”

“I’m not  _ that _ insane,” Loki argues.

“You sure about that?” Tony is smiling, looking like a little boy, like the person Loki used to want to call his best friend. “You’re a little cray-cray.”

Loki resists the urge to hide his face or argue with the assessment. He simply eats his appetizer, happy to have something in his stomach while his high is spiraling down.

“Tell me about your life,” Tony gently commands.

“I live with Thor now,” is the first thing that comes out of Loki’s mouth, because it’s the easiest thing to say. “That’s horrifying in its own weird way. Bearing witness to my brother’s weird psychosexual escapades-”

“Ooh, the love square between him and Sif and Jane and Valkyrie,” Tony interjects.

“And his blatant alcoholism are just, yeah, that really breaks my brain if you know what I mean.”

“You agreed to it, though,” Tony says, inferring what Loki hasn’t said. “Living with him, I mean.”

“Under threat of being cut off from much-needed money, which I know you would never understand,” Loki says kind of severely, not meaning to sound so mean but that’s just the way the words come out. Tony just smirks, apparently not too offended. 

“There has to be some perk aside from the cash,” Tony says, probing. Loki considers this as he finishes off his crepe, staring at his plate and his screwdriver and feeling ready to really dive into lunch. He swallows.

“I get to say I know him again,” Loki says in his most thoughtful tone. “He’s in my life again and I guess that’s just something I have to live with.”

“He wasn’t in your life last year at the Avengers party?” Tony asks, and of course, he’s smiling, going on with, “When you broke the TV and spit in Steve’s face?”

“God, why is everyone still talking about that party?” Loki asks, throwing his hands in the air. “Is Steve still mad that I spit in his face? Are you still friends with Steve after last year? I know he didn’t take you being in love with him too well-”

“Hey, we don’t talk about last year,” Tony says, suddenly very serious and very grave-faced.

Loki goes on the defensive, smiling appeasingly at Tony, at his “friend”. “All I’m saying is last year, you were pathetic and bizarre. Steve is a good friend for not dumping you after all that.”

“God, you’re such an asshole and I missed you so much,” Tony says, full of verve, shaking his head and smiling at Loki in tandem. 

They order grilled ahi tuna and prosciutto-wrapped rockfish and bond the way rich people do, over the food and the ambiance and the prices of everything, which to them appear so miniscule. Loki sees himself doing this - being friends with rich, disabled, arrogant recovering addict Tony Stark - and wonders why he thought it was going to be hard when all he had to do was shut off all of his emotions and act like a total jerk. He goes to his Religion and Media class and work afterwards, clear and conniving, trading the stuff of his lunchtime conversation with Amora and feeling full up with love with himself, the only person he’s truly been able to make it work with. Wednesday is good, and midterms are coming, and he is somehow making things work despite the darkness of his fortune.

The following week sees another confusing turn in Thor’s love/social life. It’s smack dab in the middle of midterms, and Loki is working on four papers a night on average, and Thor must be swamped with schoolwork, Loki’s sure, but for some reason on Wednesday, October 18th at approximately 8:00 PM, he’s tangled up in bed with Valkyrie and making lots of noise doing it, and all Loki can do is listen while he and Amora braid each other’s hair and make pot brownies in the main part of the house.

“This is vulgar,” Namor comments offhandedly at the repeated exclamation of, “ _ Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me! _ ” from the bedroom. He watches Loki do one side of Amora’s head in a Dutch braid with a sort of unimpressed, bored expression on his face, him sitting in the recliner with a water bottle full of vodka lemonade in his hand. “I really hate that you made us come over and hear this. What is this,  _ Jersey Shore? _ ”

“ _ Jersey Shore  _ was a phenomenon,” Loki and Amora say in unison, then both burst into laughter that nearly ruins Amora’s braid. Loki is the first to compose himself, to latch back onto Amora’s hair and smirk wryly and say, “Honestly now I’m just glad that I don’t have to experience this hell alone. This is why I need you guys, for moral support.”

“I wonder what he’s doing to her,” Amora says seriously.

Pulling off from the lip of his bottle, Namor says, “Something good, obviously.”

“Shh!” Amora hisses, giving Namor a dirty look. “Don’t make me yealous.”

“I think I’m honestly going to leave,” Namor remarks without standing up, just looking ready to jump to his feet at any moment. “Loki, I love you, but I will not be made to endure such obscenity.”

“Says the guy who sent me a speculative novel about Steve Rogers’ dick in iMessage like two days ago,” Loki quips without missing a beat.

Namor doesn’t have it in him to look ashamed. He simply stands and moves over to the coffee table, hunting for blunt wraps and some of the loose weed Loki and Amora have left on the table. “Can I have a joint for the road?” he asks, pushing nail polish and Amora’s smartphone aside. 

“What did he say about the dick?” Amora asks. “It’s not like he’s ever seen it.”

“Let’s make a list of people at Marvel U who have seen Steve Rogers’ dick,” Loki says with authority, finishing off Amora’s left braid and moving to the right side of her head to make an identical plait. “There’s Peggy Carter, because they’ve been dating since like two years ago so she  _ obviously _ has had to have seen the peen.”

“I bet all of the Avengers have seen it because locker room shenanigans, eh?” Amora speculates aloud, gazing with yearning at Thor’s bedroom door. Thor’s headboard continues to slap rhythmically against the wall.

“Bucky Barnes has seen it for sure,” Namor says as he collects some herb into a little pile on the coffee table. Professionally, he piles this weed into a blunt wrapper and sets about to rolling a joint for himself, saying all the while, “They’ve been best friends since middle school in Brooklyn, New York. There’s no way they haven’t touched dicks at least once.”

“It’s amazing  _ we _ haven’t touched dicks,” Loki remarks. Namor nods silently in his direction; in reply, he chuckles a little.

“Why are we making this list?” Amora asks without sounding too bothered about it, just really concerned for some reason. “Are we going to consult these parties for information about Steve Rogers’ dick?”

“I would,” Namor says plainly. All of a sudden, Thor releases this horrifying, gut-wrenching yell from the bedroom, and the three friends in the living room give each other the same wide-eyed look, saying the same thing - “That ended well.”

“O-kay,” Loki pronounces with a flourish as he finishes Amora’s second braid. He leans back to survey his work and finds that he is satisfied with the result. “You might not have to leave, Namor. Stay and eat a brownie.”

“Are you sure you guys even mixed them right?” Namor asks, curling up his nose at the scent of brownies infused with cannabis butter. “I don’t know what they’re supposed to smell like, but that’s pretty strongly dank if you know what I mean.”

“Maybe we should check on them,” Amora murmurs as she gets up and skips into the kitchen. While she and Loki poke at the brownies with fork tines and toothpicks, Namor puffs at his joint and sort of acts like he wants to stay, not moving in the direction of the front door in any way, just hanging out in the recliner in the living room.

Eventually, Thor’s bedroom door comes open and there is Thor himself, shirtless, clad in nothing but boxer shorts as he marches his way into the kitchen for a beer or some such. Loki looks up as soon as his brother enters the kitchen, and sure enough, Amora is melting at the sight of her long-time crush in nearly nothing regardless of the fact that he was just plowing the shit out of another woman. Sometimes his friends can be incredibly stupid, did you know?

“Hello, Thor,” Amora says in her smooth, sexy voice that she thinks makes guys like her (and most of the time, it does). Wearing her silly Halloween tights and a loose V-neck T-shirt, she gets where Thor can see her, standing in front of the kitchen counter like a casual, blonde Instagram model. “How’s midterms?”

Thor just looks confused at being spoken to by one of Loki’s friends. He opens the refrigerator, extracts a Miller Lite from within its confines, and shuts the door, saying, “They’re keeping me busy. What, are you guys cooking?”

“Pot brownies!” Amora announces, trying to look cute. Loki locks eyes with Namor in the living room and barely stops himself from gagging.

“Ooh, I’ll take one of those when they’re done,” Thor says without thinking twice, and it’s all Loki can do to not explode when Amora just nods and smiles like the perfect little housewife in reply.

“Of course!” she chirps. Loki frowns his severest frown at Thor from behind her pretty plaited head.

“Are you and your friend done with the extracurricular activities?” Loki asks in a kind of no-nonsense tone, turning the entire interaction from awkward yet pleasant to just plain awkward. Thor opens his beer with his forearm and leaves the bottlecap on the floor, because he’s an asshole.

“Yeah, Valkyrie was just about to bounce,” Thor says easily, and just like that, there’s Valkyrie in the kitchen in her high-heeled boots and her Jimi Hendrix T-shirt beneath a tight leather jacket, grabbing Thor’s arm sort of possessively. Amora’s eyes go wide as saucers.

“I’m leaving, but I’ll text you tonight,” Valkyrie says like Loki and Amora aren’t there, which Loki knows infuriates Amora all the more. She doesn’t go so far as to kiss Thor, but Loki knows that’s what Amora is waiting for like an orgasm, waiting for her heart to break in two with an audible  _ snap! _

“See you later, babe,” Thor says to Valkyrie with a quick peck on her forehead. There Amora’s heart goes,  _ snapping! _ into several discrete pieces as Valkyrie makes her way out of the house without a word. Loki and Namor exchange another knowing look across the expanse of the living room and the kitchen; looking resolute, Namor stands up with his joint and his drink and comes into the kitchen.

“How are those brownies, Amora?” he asks by way of distraction.

“Oh, they should be done in about three minutes,” Amora says in a distant and faraway way, watching Thor amble out of the kitchen with his beer in his hand. Loki yanks casually on one of her braids, smiling a little at her despite her obviously forlorn demeanor, and three minutes later they’re pulling cannabis butter brownies out of the oven amidst the strong smell of weed that permeates the house. Loki throws his hands in the air in celebration.

“Look, Amora! Brownies!” he cries with almost uncharacteristic glee.

“Yay,” Amora says, still kind of on her island, poking the brownies with a toothpick and sucking on the sweet chocolatey residue that comes off onto the wood. “Time to get high,” she remarks, this always being her coping mechanism, moving over to the refrigerator and retrieving a half-gallon of whole milk from it. Namor, being useful, grabs cups from the cabinet.

Together they drink milk and eat edibles. Loki has two papers for his Anthropology of Religion and Theology of Liberation classes that he plans to work on later when he is properly fucked up and thus in the right state of mind for intricate schoolwork. It’s a chill time with our three friends, and Amora almost looks like she’s forgotten about Thor and Valkyrie and her poor broken spirit when Thor comes back into the room - this time properly dressed - and opens the front door just in time for Fandral, Volstagg, Hogun, and Sif to come barrelling through it, loud and happy and ready to destroy the house in their merrymaking. Loki, Amora, and Namor are just kind of horrified in the kitchen as Thor’s friends come in, as Thor smacks a huge kiss against Sif’s mouth, heedless of literally what just happened.

“Dude,” Namor pronounces simply, the word dripping with disgust. 

“I get it,” Amora says softly, sounding emo as hell, dropping half of a pot brownie back into the baking pan with a hand suddenly gone limp. “It’s just everyone else that’s so attractive and sexy but not me.”

“Oh my God, shut up,” Loki says before he can stop himself, resisting the call to just stuff his face full of chocolate cannabis goodness. “Thor is terrible and you’re just desperate. Let’s stop kidding ourselves.”

“We have pot brownies, guys!” Thor is announcing to the congregation, and all at once everyone is in the kitchen, converging upon Loki and Amora’s good work with grabby hands and open mouths. Amora gives Sif a really hard, probing look as she passes, and Loki waits for it - the moment when the shit hits the fan proper.

Amidst the munching and the laughing and the chatter of Thor and all his friends, amidst Thor’s arm around Sif’s middle and Loki and Namor’s perfectly matching expressions of patent horror, Amora snorts and says in an undertone to Sif, “You’re lucky he actually likes you.”

Loki wants to die. Sif looks at Amora strangely, not sure if she heard her correctly. “Excuse me?”

“I said you’re lucky you’re one of the ones he actually likes,” Amora clarifies with a deceptively friendly smile. “You and Valkyrie. You should just sister-wife it up, really. I would love to join the harem.”

“Valkyrie was here?” Sif asks, turning to Thor for answers this time. “What was she doing here? Did you guys hang out?”

“Oh, they did more than hang out,” Amora comments without being asked, idly touching her leftover pot brownie with one delicately manicured finger. “We heard it all. It sounded like a lot of fun, but I guess you’d know a lot about that.”

Thor looks caught in a vice of his own making. Loki is dying to beg Amora to shut the fuck up, knowing his friend like he knows himself and knowing she is living for the drama she’s currently starting. Sif gives Thor a hard, accusatory look and asks him, “Why are you sleeping with Valkyrie again? I thought we were together.”

“We’re just friends with benefits, Sif, you know that,” Thor says in a voice that is strong but touched with insecurity. Fandral, Volstagg, and Hogun awkwardly stand by with beers in their hands, looking uncomfortable, nearly on the verge of scramming at the sign of discord.

Sif looks calm but enraged. “Oh, really? And what are you and Valkyrie?”

“We’re in a non-monogamous relationship,” Thor explains evenly. Loki’s hair nearly jumps right out of his head.

“We’re leaving,” Loki says, grabbing Amora’s arm with one hand and Namor’s with the other. He knows where his jacket, his backpack, and his car keys are and they are right what he’s headed for. “Thanks for eating all our food!” he announces on his way out of the kitchen, gathering up his friends and his things as fast as he can.

“Thor, I really want to know what’s wrong with you,” Sif is saying in a loud voice unbefitting the occasion, pulling out of Thor’s grasp and pointing a finger of accusation directly at the center of his chest. “Why can’t you just be honest about what you want?!”

“To be fair, I think he just was,” Fandral points out quietly. He’s immediately chastened when Sif whirls on him.

“Fandral, this isn’t about you!” she cries, apparently satisfied when he puts up a defensive hand and goes quiet.

“Sif, calm down!” Thor exclaims, and this is the last thing Loki hears before suddenly three people are yelling at the same time, all of them trying to get to the bottom of Thor’s heart. Loki literally just grabs his friends and runs out of the door, getting in Namor’s sexy ass car and flooring it to his and Amora’s apartment, all of them dazed and angry and feeling like shit.

“Thank you for making that thirty times more awful than it had to be,” Loki pronounces as soon as they walk in the house. Amora salutes him silently, looking proud.

Loki ends up wanting to spend a lot of time at his friends’ place after this incident, sick of Thor’s blatant alcoholism and the whole tornado of what’s going on with him and his posse at home. On Friday, Fandral and Hogun come over to get crossfaded with Thor and make loud noise with the television and the drum set. Sounds of masculine hedonism fill the house - laughter and baritone speech, delivered at the higher decibels and disturbing everyone within earshot. Loki retaliates by going outside and keying  _ ASSHOLE _ into Fandral’s Toyota Corolla, him so tired of seeing this nondescript blue car in his driveway every night, blocking Sleipnir out of its rightful parking space. Two days later, Thor drinks all day long - starting with Miller High Life (the champagne of beers, he likes to remind everyone) in the morning, moving onto fluorescent yellow whiskey sours in the afternoon, and ending fucked up and and near-unconscious with gin and Sprite in the evening, lying on one of the living room couches with his head face-down in the pillows. Loki stops himself from calling Namor and asking to get picked up and instead eats Thor’s rocky road ice cream right out of the tub, hating the rocklike texture of nuts between his teeth and needing his sugar fix regardless.

On Monday, Mother calls to talk about Thor.

“Hello, darling,” she says into the phone, sounding sweet and kind of panicked. “How are you today?”

“Busy,” Loki says, watching the road unfold in front of him as he drives home from work. “I have so much on my plate today it’s kind of stressing me out.”

“Oh dear,” Mother says. “I didn’t call you at a bad time, did I?”

“No, Mom, I’m just on my way home. I can talk.”

“Good.” Mother releases a short, strained peal of laughter. “I’m glad I caught you. I’m worried about your brother.”

Loki recalls Thor yesterday night, vomiting in the kitchen sink because he couldn’t reach the bathroom in time. He grimaces hard at his windshield. “Why?”

“I haven’t been able to get a hold of him in over a week.” Mother sounds desperately unhappy, which is a feat for a person as habitually happy as she is. She is probably sitting in her office at this time, finishing up after a day of writing and filing bank reconciliations and doing all kinds of other Important and Official things at her desk, and she’s probably frowning too as she flings words into her cellphone, as she says, “Normally I talk to him once a week like I do you, but this whole past week, I haven’t been able to get him on the phone at all.”

“Mom, relax. Last week was midterms.”

“I know, but it’s strange! I usually can always get him when I really need him, and I really needed him yesterday. Your father wants to talk to him about something important and I just wanted to make sure he wasn’t nervous about it.”

“What is ‘ _ something important’ _ ?” Loki asks without thinking twice about it, knowing that Mother will tell him.

Sure enough, she says, “Oh, just post-graduation and job stuff. You know how badly your father wants Thor to work at Asgard after he graduates.”

“Yeah, that’s never going to happen,” Loki says with a short snort of a laugh, knowing Thor as well as he can say he does. “Thor wants to be the weatherman and study cloud formations and cosmological phenomena and that’s that, man.”

“I know…” Mother’s voice is soft, rounded with acknowledgement. “I love him, I do. I just wish he and your father would get along more.”

Loki cannot possibly tell his mother how much he desperately doesn’t want to be having this conversation. He frowns at the road, at himself in his rearview mirror. He decides to say something he thinks will get him out of this verbal hole the fastest. “I’ll tell Thor you called and need to talk to him. Maybe he’ll listen to me, maybe not, but he’s kind of a mess right now.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Suddenly Mother’s voice is full of alarm, and Loki curses himself for mentioning anything.

“I don’t know, Mom, he’s basically an alcoholic. Every day he drinks and gets really messed up and I just have to clean up the inevitable mess he leaves behind.”

Mother is silent for a considerable moment. Loki rolls to a stop at a red light and looks at Anchorage around him, awaiting his home, his puppy, his perfect sativa space in which to do homework and text his friends. For several seconds, they simply breathe at each other on the phone, and Loki is comfortable doing this instead of talking about his brother. It’s nice to just be with his mom sometimes.

Then, Mother says, “I’ll get him on the phone tonight. Thank you, Loki. I really needed that bit of honesty from you.”

Loki feels kind of like a tattle-taling piece of shit, but sighs regardless. “No problem, Mom. It’s always nice to hear from you, too.”

The following night, he goes to watch Natasha Romanoff, Avenger and yoga club bitch extraordinaire, dance on a darkened stage with the other members of the dance department. He sits in an auditorium filled with the sounds of Tchaikovsky, sandwiched between Namor and Amora, clad in his prettiest sweater and dewy eye makeup that makes him look fresh and sleepy, and as Natasha and the other dancers prance, weave, and bob all about the stage as swans, princes, and warlocks, Loki weeps a little, taken by the beauty of the performance. Amora makes fun of him mercilessly as they walk to the parking garage afterward. 

“You’re such a pathetic, crybaby bitch,” she says with a cackle, holding his hand and squeezing it viciously. “Crying at Miss Natasha Romanoff dancing  _ Swan Lake _ at the end of October.”

“Bitch, shut up!” Loki cries, wiping at his residual tears with his free hand. “It was beautiful and you know it!”

Namor, walking alongside them, makes a low sound of assent. “It was a really nice performance. Marvelites know how to do it well.”

Loki stops walking, getting in front of Amora and kneeling down on the sidewalk. “Get on my back, I’ll carry you to the car.”

Amora looks at him strangely for a moment. “Why do you want to do that?”

“Because I’m your best friend and I love you.”

That’s all it takes, really. Amora climbs onto Loki’s back, and Loki piggybacks her all the way to Namor’s BMW on the third floor of the parking garage, them singing and laughing and chattering on like lemurs the whole time. On the last Friday of the month, they go to the really famous student bar near campus - Polar Bar, outfitted with pool tables, many stools, and lots of beer on tap. Marvelites congregate in all corners of the place, sipping from cups of amber liquid and looking glassy-eyed and friendly. Loki, Amora, and Namor walk in in an all-black ensemble, sexy, dark and sort of dangerous looking in the casual atmosphere of the bar. They order glasses of Juicifer and then sit back at the bar, talking shit at their customary moderate-to-high volume.

“ _ Kille _ , this guy went out with Tony Stark,” Amora says loudly, alerting everyone who’s anyone who wants to know about Tony Stark (i.e., everyone in the bar right now). Even the bartender looks up, interested in this good bit of gossip.

Loki, for his part, sort of hides behind his beer. “Are we really talking about Tony again,” he says, not really asking it as a question.

“Fucking asshole,” Namor says, sloshed, on his third glass of beer for the night and he’d been drinking his usual vodka lemonades earlier. Loki can tell he’s drunk by the way his syllables slide together; Namor is normally so very composed. “And he had the nerve to talk about Pepper Potts to you, like he didn’t totally fuck you and fall in love with you and then just pop into the normiest relationship of all normie relationships.”

“You know, you both like to use that word -  _ normie _ ,” Loki points out, tipping his beer briefly in Namor’s direction.

“I hate that guy,” Namor goes on, not caring. “I hate how perfect and exceptional he thinks he is when really he’s just a stupid fuckboy asshole just like literally every man ever is, and I hate that you went to lunch with him and just ate his shit up because you had to go and sleep with him last summer.”

Loki, unable to take this, puts his hands over his ears and yells a little. Amora laughs and rubs his forearm soothingly, then keeps talking shit about Tony Stark, because that’s all they really know how to do.

“He invited Loki to this Halloween party tomorrow,” she says, then smiles, holding her arms out. “We  _ have _ to go, right? I already have my costume - I’m being the Wicked Witch of the West.”

“Dude, what am I going to go to Tony Stark and the Avengers’ Halloween party as?” Loki asks, snatching his beer up from the bar to take a sip from it. “The party’s tomorrow night and I don’t have a costume because I don’t go to Avengers parties anymore.”

“Raid my closet and be Frank-n-Furter,” Amora spits out like she’d been waiting to spit it out all night. “I have the makeup and the corset and garters and fishnets and pearls, and you just have to put your leather jacket on and smoke a cigarette and  _ voila! _ You’re Frank-n-Furter!”

“That’s actually a really sexy idea,” Namor remarks. He’d never have openly called Loki sexy if he wasn’t drunk. 

“What will  _ you _ be, huh?” Loki asks his friend, looking at him with a weird, bashful smile on his face.

“Let’s go shopping for a shitty Poseidon costume and blue hair spray,” Namor says, checking his Starkwatch. “It’s only 8:30. Those costume shops should still be open, right? Target is fucking open, right?”

“Wait, guys, I want to drink and buy acid,” Amora interjects, eyeing Quentin Beck (well-known carrier and seller of acid) where he’s loitering and playing on his phone in the corner of the bar.

“Why do you want to buy acid?” Loki asks with genuine concern, not altogether opposed to the thought of doing acid, but suspicious of his friend’s motives.

“Wouldn’t that be an amazing time?” Amora asks, beaming with her whole face. “We do acid. We get dressed for the party. We go to the party tripping on acid. Lives are lost and hearts are broken!”

“That’s something you guys can do together,” Namor declares, finishing off his beer. “I’m going to get a Halloween costume. Are you coming, Loki?” He holds his hand out to him like a Disney prince.

Loki, feeling princessy, takes Namor’s hand and says, “Of course.” Amora buys acid from Quentin and they all take a trip to Target to buy the makings of a Poseidon costume for Namor, and it looks like tomorrow they’re going to an Avengers party, which Loki supposes is swell.

When they show up at Tony Stark’s house the next day, Amora’s face is green and Loki is wearing the highest heels he could find in his closet. People are playing with strobe lights in the living room, already roaring drunk and it’s only 7:35 PM, and Loki is holding Amora’s hand as tight as he can as she pulls him into the house, into this nexus of people, electric sound, and color. All around are clowns, hula dancers, babies, and bumblebees; in the middle of everything, there is Steve Rogers dressed as Superman, glowing in Loki’s eyes in the blue-and-red vibrancy of his costume. Amora, vibrating like a green beetle, bumps Loki’s hip with her own and asks, “Do we want to get alcohol?”

“After dropping acid?” Loki asks, giving his friend a somewhat incredulous look.

At his right, Namor looks majestic and bored. MGMT and Passion Pit pulse through surround sound speakers. Somewhere in or around the house, Thor is getting plastered and Loki intrinsically knows this, knows this in his marrow. He wants to dance, so he grabs his friends by the hand and pulls them into a somewhat unoccupied corner of the house to move their bodies to the rhythm of the music.

Amora, perpetually thirsty, moves to speak into Loki’s ear. “Lemon juice?” she asks simply.

Loki, feeling like a nerve ending, nods and smiles with a red, lipstuck mouth. “Yeah!”

They find the kitchen, which is finished with granite and stainless steel everywhere. In the backsplash, Loki sees his dark reflection, him in leather, lace, and pearls. The room is vacant when they enter, so they are free to openly dig around in Tony’s huge fucking fridge for lemons and try to locate a juicer or some such appliance. Loki frowns at the contents of the fridge - a Brita filled with water, cans of La Croix, a single banana, and Tupperware containers labeled “RHODEY”, but nothing resembling a lemon.

“Ugh, am I really about to drink pamplemousse La Croix out of my ex’s fridge?” Loki asks his friends, overtaken by a feeling of abject wrongness. Namor, fiddling with the fishnets draped across his shoulder, gives him a kind of severe look.

“Tony Stark is not your ex,” he says. “That implies that you formally dated him before, which you didn’t.”

“Oh, let him get away with a little  _ ex _ talk,” Amora interjects from where he’s poking around in an overhead cabinet, grabbing measuring cups and a funnel. “ _ Kille _ , why does he have measuring cups when he presumably doesn’t cook? I can’t see Tony Stark cooking.”

“He probably has a maid that comes in and does it,” Loki speculates with absolutely nothing to back this assertion up. Looking at the rest of the house through the breakfast bar, he watches Superman and Marilyn Monroe (i.e., Peggy Carter in a decent reproduction of the  _ Seven Year Itch _ dress) dance in a somewhat silly fashion in the living room, their arms around each other, Peggy in a blonde wig that changes her whole complexion. Freshmen not yet old enough to purchase alcohol legally are drinking from Solo cups in the corner, watching their upperclassmen get their party on from the sidelines. Loki doesn’t think about it, just grabs a can of La Croix from the refrigerator and pops it open, listening to the satisfying  _ crack _ of metal and carbonation. He downs like a third of the can in one go, then glances at his friends, who are looking at him like he’s lost his mind. “What?” he asks. “It’s a party.”

Amora closes the cabinet and starts to look in drawers. “There has to be something here that tells me something about him. What does he eat, how does he eat it. You spent time with him, Loki, you know about him.”

“Guys, I really am  _ so tired _ of talking about Tony,” Loki says in a whiny voice, his desperation increasing when Namor just starts to smile at him. “He’s just a stupid guy who’s kind of my friend now, and I know talking shit is like our favorite thing to do, but can we move on to alternative subjects like my brother or Natasha Romanoff, who literally came to this thing in a catsuit that makes her tits look so big?”

“Natasha Romanoff can huff my farts,” Amora announces, almost slamming the utensil drawer shut in her zeal. Loki doesn’t know what Amora’s deal with the Russian Avenger is all about, but he finds it amusing enough to bring Natasha up every time it’s even a little appropriate. Amora throws her hands up in the air, her blonde waves bouncing a little and her witch’s hat managing to stay firmly upon her head.”My breasts are bigger than hers. I have 16 Ds! Natasha Romanoff is just a measly little C-cup like everyone else.”

“Oh my God, what’s the point?” Namor asks loudly, rude in the welcome way he always is. He looks up past Loki’s shoulder and suddenly straightens, getting right next to Loki and saying in an undertone, “Tony Stark and Pepper Potts are coming.”

Loki feels his blood turn to ice. He takes another really long sip from his La Croix and prepares to face the dragon, his skin crawling on the floor out of the room, the world a loud and scary place (even louder and scarier than usual thanks to the LSD).

Tony is dressed like Roger Rabbit and Pepper is dressed as his hot wife Jessica. Pepper doesn’t really have boobs to speak of at all (which makes Amora unspeakably angry for God knows what reason), but somehow she’s holding up her sparkly backless, strapless dress with relative ease. Incidentally, Tony has an orange and a lemon in his hands when he comes into the kitchen, and Loki feels thirsty, insane with what’s going on at this party he didn’t even want to come to.

“Hey, guys,” Tony says casually, passing into the kitchen and putting the citrus down on the granite counter. He gives Loki an unexpectedly warm smile. “Hey, Loki. Are you guys having a blast in my kitchen?”

“Oh, yeah, it’s very high-tech, futuristic,” Namor deadpans, standing so close to Loki that they’re touching. Pepper just sort of dawdles by Tony, looking happy but somewhat awkward, as she has no idea who any of these people, save Loki, are.

“We were actually looking for a lemon,” Amora says with a smile, crazily latching onto the lemon with her eyes. “We like to drink straight lemon juice when we come to Avengers parties on acid.”

“Ahh, acid,” Tony practically moans, moving over to the cabinet Amora was just looking in to grab a manual juicer out of it. “I had a lot of fun times in high school with acid. It’s like the whole world belonged to me for eight hours. How are you guys feeling?”

Loki and Amora look at each other. Eyes are weird right now, so they have a hard time making full-on eye contact. They both shrug, and Loki says, “I’m thinking of about three gajillion things right now, all of them funny.”

“Yeah, you’re high,” Tony utters with a laugh, cutting his lemon in half with a knife from the utensil drawer.

“Do you like his costume?” Amora asks loudly, sort of confrontationally, and it’s all Loki can do not to burst into laughter. She gestures expansively to Loki’s everything. “He’s a beautiful transvestite!”

Tony gives him a once-over, then looks at Pepper slyly and smiles, his bunny ears quirked cutely. “He is that,” he remarks as he juices his lemon, and Loki wants to fly into the ether and disappear forever, never to be seen again after this night.

Namor puts an arm around Loki’s shoulder. He puts his face next to Loki’s ear and whispers, “I left my phone charger in your truck last night.” Tony watches this exchange, not hearing any of it, and suddenly goes red in the face, looking so deeply bothered and attacked by this public display of intimacy. He pours lemon juice into two squarish glasses for Loki and Amora and says, “Enjoy, friends. Maybe check out the back patio while you’re here. We have heat lamps.”

Sure enough, within fifteen minutes they’re drinking lemon juice on the back patio under the orange glow of a propane heat lamp, watching Bruce Banner (linebacker) beat Clint Barton (wide receiver) to a bloody pulp in the middle of the backyard. A throng of people surrounds the brawl, whispering that it all started when Clint threw a drink on Bruce’s ex-girlfriend or something, and the onlookers are cheering the violence on, eating it right up. Loki looks on for long minutes, then turns to Namor and asks, “Why do they encourage it? The brutality?”

“Because it’s funny,” Namor says automatically.

“Funny?” Loki asks over the rim of his glass. “What’s so funny about watching human beings inflict pain on each other?”

“Funny is the wrong word,” Namor admits, shaking his head a little. “Entertaining would be more accurate. It’s in our nature to seek out and consume each other’s pain. It gives it meaning. It’s cathartic.”

“Fuck catharsis,” Loki pronounces, scoffing and scowling with his pretty mouth. “I wish we were all dead.”

In the crowd, there is Thor, dressed in a unicorn onesie and hollering drunkenly on with an angelic Valkyrie at his side. Loki watches his brother, mouth full of acid and gall, and he thinks,  _ what a night _ . Amora steals the rest of his lemon juice and eventually goes to find alcohol inside the house while Loki and Namor sit back and eat Tootsie Rolls on the patio. It feels like nothing will change at this point without serious bloodshed.


	4. NOVEMBER

#  _NOVEMBER_

Scorpio season comes barrelling in like a train, screeching to anyone that will listen to it. By the time it’s fully in swing, everyone’s ears are bleeding from the sound, and we’re all very very tired of trying to sleep and not being able to. Loki goes to bed on the first day of November listening to Thor and Valkyrie fight it out about absolutely nothing in the living room - some long row having to do with their “reputations” and “commitment issues” and how Thor “feels.” He agrees with Valkyrie’s various points about how Thor seems unable to settle down with one partner, with one woman, and finds himself vaguely enraged when Thor starts talking about how he looks to other people dating Valkyrie, who is wild and alternative and (he doesn’t say it) not white. The last thing Loki hears before dropping off to sleep is the sound of the front door slamming and Thor slamming the refrigerator door shut, probably after grabbing a beer from it or whatever. The next morning, he gets up and finds the kitchen a mess, and that’s just the greatest thing ever, he guesses. 

Later, he scrolls through Facebook. His jaw drops when he sees the following.

> **Thor Skywalker  
> ** November 2
> 
> **In a Relationship with Sif Goldenlock**

  
  


“I’ve seen it all,” Loki says, in the middle of a crowded elevator and not caring who hears him. A fat filipino freshman looks at him weirdly; he just rolls his eyes and gets off on his floor, closing Facebook and ending his tenuous association with sanity.

On Tuesday, November 7th, his Theology of Liberation class convenes in Room 2 in the library. Loki, Valkyrie, Korg Wahanui, Peggy Carter, Carol Danvers, and Hope Van Dyne climb into the mezzanine of the library and sit down around a rectangular table while their professor, Dr. Endwi Gast, sets up a movie on the projector hooked up to the desktop computer at the fore of the room. Loki tries not to watch Valkyrie too hard as she pulls out her Starkbook, feeling so much sympathy for her as a racial other that he absolutely refuses to articulate. 

“I’m still so upset Steve couldn’t take this class,” Peggy is saying to Carol on their side of the table, her fiddling with a ballpoint pen with a red pompom on it and looking classically beautiful, warm on this early November day in Alaska. Carol is shrugging herself out of her bomber jacket and wearing a _God Bless America_ with a bald eagle T-shirt.

“He would have loved it in here,” Carol admits, smiling, knowing Steve as a fellow Avenger. Loki doesn’t permit himself to openly gag at the thought of having a class with Steve Rogers, but he does roll his eyes a little when no one is looking. 

Korg Wahanui, political science major, passes out flyers for the Queer-Straight Alliance “Queer Night.” “You guys should come check it out,” he says in his bouncy New Zealand accent, wearing a woven rainbow bracelet on his left wrist and smiling extra friendly at everyone. “It’s gonna be choice.”

Loki looks disinterestedly at the flyer, its brazen rainbow colors and little party emojis printed all over the place. It’s not that he’s not the queerest thing over or that there’s any real dearth of queer people on campus; it’s just that the Queer-Straight Alliance is just about the most unappealing club on campus, and the idea to going to one of their full-blown functions sounds as fun as peeling his eyelids off with a butter knife.

Hope Van Dyne sits next to Loki, gorgeous in a low-key way. Loki surreptitiously watches her text Scott Lang, her saying: _YOU ARE NOT COMING TO DINNER WITH MY MOM AND DAD I DON’T CARE THAT MY DAD INVITED YOU_ , Scott replying: _Hope it’s okay, we’re not getting married and you’re not going to explode :)_. He wonders in a faraway way what that is all about and how amazing it is that Hope can project such calm on the surface while being in such apparent fury, him suddenly aware of other Marvelites in a way he not very often is.

“Okay, class,” Dr. Gast suddenly pronounces in his honey baritone voice, gesturing really gayly at the projector screen. “Enjoy _Malcolm X_ , 1992, by revolutionary and infamous director Spike Lee. I really enjoy showing this film to my classes - it just gets at liberation theology in a way that other films don’t, save for _Gandhi_ and _The Prince of Egypt_ , which we’ll be reviewing later this semester.” Having talked his way through a good portion of the opening credits, Dr. Gast sort of slinks away to the back of the room, mumbling something beneath his breath all the while and trifling with his turquoise rings. Loki closes his eyes for a long time, listening to the opening of the film and hating his life, his choice of major, his whole fucking existence.

Two days later, he’s feeling lonely when he gets out of Theology of Liberation, having talked himself hoarse about the Nation of Islam and its theological tenets and felt no camaraderie with his classmates or with his professor. He follows Carol Danvers to the parking garage and drives a few cars behind her on his way to Marvel’s nearby football field. Tony Stark has given him carte blanche to show up to Avengers football practice, see, and in the mood he’s in, it seems appropriate to come on this windy afternoon.

Loki sits in the bleachers, bundled up in his customary wool and leather and texting the group chat as he watches the Avengers run laps around the football field. Steve Rogers and Tony Stark lead the pack, damn-near sprinting, superhuman. Then there’s Carol Danvers, James Rhodes, and Sam Wilson just behind them in a tight cluster, almost avian in their speed; Loki feels somewhat dizzy watching them round the field. Victor Shade and Wanda Maximoff, the team’s power couple/international student duo, run at considerable speed behind the big time sprinters, then there is T’Challa Udaku, Bruce Banner, and Thor running at about the rate you’d expect from college football players, them the team’s heavy-lifters, its biggest men. Following them are Natasha Romanoff, Clint Barton, and Peter Parker the freshman, the team’s newest member. Clint still looks a little banged up from the Halloween party, but otherwise he’s easily keeping pace with Natasha, who is his best friend if Loki recalls Avengers team interdynamics correctly. Loki watches each member as they appear in his vision, him hovering mostly around Thor, who looks happy and hard-working and like he’s going to come home later absolutely whipped.

> **Today** 5:17 PM
> 
> **loki skywalker  
> ** the avengers are all really hot and it makes me mad. [pouting face emoji]
> 
> steve rogers is perfect, he has the perfect ass. tony has money so he’s automatically hot. and carol danvers and wanda maximoff and natasha are all so fucking sexy oh my god. and then the BLACK GUYS ON THE TEAM ARE SO HOT. TCHALLA MAKES ME SWOON. WILSON AND RHODES ARE SO HANDSOME. and bruce banner is really cute i guess and the freshman and clint are just there lmao but anyway you get my point
> 
> **amora akerman  
> ** You forgot about your brother! The most beautiful Avenger of all [smiling face with hearts emoji]
> 
> **namor mckenzie  
> ** Oh, god, Amora, please stop for today. Really we could go one day without you sucking Thor’s dick.
> 
> You’re right though, Loki. I keep thinking about what you were saying the other day about everyone who’s seen Steve Rogers’ dick and I’m just [face savoring food emoji]
> 
> **loki skywalker  
> ** i really hate both you thirsty bitches sooooo much [rolling on the floor laughing emoji]

  
  


After the laps, the Avengers are running football drills for thirty minutes, practicing formations and plays and ramming into blocking shields with their broad, muscly bodies. Loki puts his glasses on to really survey how sweaty and built each player is, the ripple of muscle beneath slick skin and wet hair on the scalp. It’s November so he’s freezing his little ass off, rubbing himself in his jacket and sweater and breathing into his cupped hands to keep warm, but the Avengers in their long sleeves and their practice jerseys and tights are burning it up on the field. Dr. Nicholas Fury, criminal justice professor and Avengers coach, stands on the sidelines making notes and barking direction and good-natured abuse to the players.

Eventually, there is a break. While the rest of the players disperse into their own groups - Thor with Bruce and T’Challa; Steve with Natasha, Clint, and Sam; Victor and Wanda; the freshman lingering with whoever will have him - Tony comes walking up the bleachers to Loki, looking tired and charming and oh so good.

“I didn’t think you’d actually come to one of these things,” Tony says to him as he approaches. He stops within a couple of bleachers to Loki and gives him a devilish smile. “We don’t really do much but, you know, run around and punch each other - I didn’t think you’d be into that.”

“Of course I’m into it,” Loki says unconvincingly. “I like, you know, sports and stuff. The ball and the touchdown. I’m down with it.”

Tony grins and laughs openly, throwing his head back a little in his mirth. “Do you know what a Wing-T is?”

“Dude, I don’t know. A formation?”

“Exactly!” Tony looks so unspeakably proud of Loki in this moment, and Loki isn’t quite sure what to make of that. “It’s a little bit more than just a formation, but I think you have the gist of it.”

“Great, I actually am becoming one of you,” Loki deadpans, shaking his head in disgrace.

“What’s so wrong about being one of us?” Tony asks genuinely, wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of one gloved hand. “Well, I mean, I get not wanting to be like your brother.” Ostentatiously, Tony points directly at where Thor is standing alongside the football field and says loudly, “Thor is like the worst member of the team in terms of what he does on a daily basis.”

“Well, I mean, yeah, I know that. I live with him.” Loki’s voice is just as loud as he says, “He’s like an alcoholic that does nothing but party all the time, and I have no idea how he’s passing his classes or if he’s passing them at all.”

“Glass houses, man, but that’s so pathetic,” Tony remarks. “What, is he deeply traumatized and trying to work through it or some dumb shit like that?”

“Growing up a Skywalker would do that to a person,” Loki says in a sort of resigned way, realizing all at once the truth of what he’s said. He shakes his head a little, feeling a chill that has nothing to do with the wintry climate.

“You guys need to get over it,” Tony says affirmatively, looking and sounding like such a douchebag. “I’ve had the most traumatizing childhood ever and I got all the drugs and alcohol out of my system and I’m doing better than ever. What’s your excuse?”

“I don’t know if you’ve heard of something, it’s called _mental illness_ ,” Loki retorts, feeling slightly miffed. “We could get rid of all of the drugs and the alcohol and become the most upstanding people in the non-contiguous United States, but we’d still be sick, and that’s completely valid.”

Tony rolls his eyes like a teenager, waving a hand dismissively. “Yeah, yeah, that’s just the story you like to tell yourself about who you are.”

“Oh my God, you’re the storytelling maven!” Loki cries, throwing his hands temporarily in the air. “You’re like a fucked up drug addict with daddy issues and PTSD and probably a personality disorder and you like to tell the story that you’re healthy just because you have a girlfriend and you don’t touch substances anymore!”

Tony gives him a kind of hard, severe look. “And what about you, Loki?” he asks with utter seriousness. “Who are you?”

“I’m a fucking Eskimo who thinks about slitting my wrists every day and needs weed just to function like a semi-normal, semi-sane person,” Loki says without missing a single beat, nodding affirmatively after he has completed the sentence. “Yep, that’s me.”

“That was really honest,” Tony notes, watching Loki carefully, almost warmly. “I like you because sometimes you’re really real like that. Real eyes realize real lies, you know?”

Loki pushes back the urge to laugh, to do anything but offer a wry smile. The thing about him is he doesn’t know how not to be vulnerable, except when he does. He lives with his heart on his sleeve, hides nothing from anyone but his father, but maybe behind all that calculated oversharing and screaming himself hoarse to anyone who will listen, there’s something softer, subtler, and even more truthful than the simple, full cyclonic force of his psyche barrelling through his life at and over everyone, ever. Maybe it’s not vulnerability at all, just honesty. Maybe it’s not honesty either.

“You should drink something,” Loki says blandly, pointing to the Avengers on the field nursing bottles of Gatorade. “You should go talk to Steve. Aren’t you guys friends again?”

Tony shrugs noncommittally about both the drink and Steve. “Whatever, we’re okay. I don’t need to be attached to his hip or anything. I’d rather talk to you.”

Loki’s smile broadens a bit. “So talk to me.”

Tony does, blabbing his mouth about his teammates and his dad (who he calls The Stark), commenting on how good Loki looks today, complaining about their shared class because it’s easy to do. Loki thinks about the time when he wanted to be Tony’s best friend, his perfect twin, and he basks in this man’s attention like it is the sun and he is a cold, red rock in the dawn. Eventually break time ends and Tony goes back to doing football drills with all the men and women he just talked mad shit about, and Loki finds himself watching practice for about fifteen minutes longer before deciding he wants to go home and get in bed for a little while. He doesn’t bother to wave goodbye, just leaves and drives on through Anchorage, back to his dog and his nice, hopefully clean apartment.

On Saturday, November 11th, it is Loki’s twenty-first birthday. He gets up in the morning and opens the fridge and sees two half-depleted six packs of Miller High Life, and he wonders if he’s so depraved as to have a drop of alcohol on the morning of his twenty-first birthday. He grabs his yogurt and closes the refrigerator, feeling adult, proud of his self-control, which is practically the cornerstone of his life. He eats his breakfast and enjoys his Saturday as it passes through a good novel and melon slices with salt on them.

That evening, he drives to Amora and Namor’s apartment with his nicest sweater and sex temptress makeup on. He is greeted with a perfect single-tier coconut pineapple cake and a bottle of Barefoot Moscato - which is white wine, but is very good and thus acceptable for him on his day. Namor cuts him two tiny pieces of cake and they sit in the living room and toast and roast each other.

“Oh my God, okay,” Loki says, composing himself to go in on Amora. “Amora is so wonderful in literally every way, but in order to get to the good parts of her, you have to take a journey through the horror that is her rising personality. You have to get through the fact that she’s a raging misogynist-”

“Hey, I’m not a misogynist!” Amora cries, darting a hand out to hit Loki’s forearm. “I’m just very critical and our fellow female students are easy prey.”

“Dude, you talk so much shit about Natasha Romanoff and Peggy Carter and Carol Danvers and like, Jessica Jones, who I still have no idea who that is aside from the fact that she’s doing Dr. Kilgrave!”

“They’re easy prey!” Amora screeches like a banshee, bristling angrily where she sits in her favorite leather chair.

“Then you have to get through the constant fawning over Thor, which is unbearable on a good day,” Loki goes on, holding his wine glass close to his face and taking a sip from it with his momentary pause. “But after you get past all the anger and the conniving bullshit she likes to pull, you get to see this woman that’s so fucking artistic and brave and interesting and silly, and that’s why you’re my best friend, because I’ve gotten through all the terrible horrible shit.”

“Loki Skywalker,” Amora says in an even tone, looking at him like she wants to rip him in half. 

“Yes, bestie?” he asks sweetly.

“Loki has no taste. He has taste that he will show off freely, and that’s good taste. He likes to read good books and he doesn’t waste his time with nonsense television and his personal style is sharp and attractive. But then there’s the underbelly of what Loki likes, and that’s just like trash everything, like junk food and cookie dough ice cream and _Jersey Shore_ and socks from China that take forever to get here but they have sushi on them so of course he _needs_ them.”

“God, you are so mean,” Loki weeps. Namor is smiling where he sits on the couch, eating his cake and drinking his wine.

“And then of course, there is the whole Tony Stark issue that everyone just loves to talk about,” Amora continues, grinning wolfishly. “Loki likes pain, is the thing. He likes getting hurt and showing his hurt to everyone as proof that he’s alive, which is the only reason he could ostensibly be entertaining a friendship or a relationship with Tony Stark. But who are we to judge Loki? We’re all a little bit like that, and Loki is a hell of a lot smarter than most of us, so instead we should celebrate his efforts, especially because! It’s his birthday!” Amora grabs the little kazoo she previously discarded on the arm of her chair and blows a little tune into it.

Loki feels his heart swell to outsize within him. He munches on his cake and barely quells the spring of tears inside him, begging to come out of his face, embarrassing and customary for him. Amora toasts/roasts Namor and Namor does both of them in his usual matter-of-fact way, and they manage to finish the cake and the wine within two hours, and Loki is so happy he might implode inward with the force of his mirth. He drives home that night with a song in his heart, almost missing his turn into his driveway due to his healthy wine buzz.

When he walks into the house, the kitchen light is on and Thor is standing in front of the refrigerator, but strangely no one else is home. Loki has to remind himself that it’s Saturday, thinking it odd that none of Thor’s friends would be here on such a conspicuously free night. Thor comes out of the kitchen upon his entrance into the house and watches him with a weird look on his face for a moment. Loki doesn’t immediately bolt for his room; instead, he looks back at Thor and asks, “What?”

“Happy birthday,” Thor says simply, turning away after an instant to retreat back into the kitchen. Loki’s not sure whether his brother has said it because Thor remembered his birthday or because he has a golden balloon from Amora and Namor’s party in his hand, but regardless, he feels warm.

“Thanks,” he says plainly, then goes on to bed. His sleep, silent and long, is divine.

The next morning, there is a knock on the door at 9:00 sharp. Loki is lucky he’s up drinking coffee in the kitchen when it happens; he puts his mug down and goes to answer the door, mystified as to who it could be.

It is a teenager with a bouquet of a dozen black roses and baby’s breath. Loki reads the card and nearly drops the whole ensemble on the floor.

> _I’m a day late, but at least I remembered. Hope you had a great time on your birthday._
> 
> _\- Tony_

  
  


“What the whole ass fuck,” Loki blurts out, then smiles warmly at the deliveryperson and says, “Thank you.” He closes the door, shaking a little, looking at these pretty, overdramatic flowers and the casual card that came with them and not knowing how he feels at all about anything. Loki wonders for a long while how Tony got his address, then remembers that he lives with Thor, but why would Tony need Thor’s address? They’re not sending each other mail as far as Loki knows. Then he asks himself if Tony asked Thor for his address, and that brings up like thirteen more questions inside him, and he’s standing in the living room with his flowers knowing nothing, wondering what in the hell he’s supposed to do now.

In the middle of all this, Thor comes out in his sleep clothes and peers suspiciously at the bouquet in Loki’s hands. “What the hell is that? Was that the knock at the door?”

Loki nods, saying, “Tony Stark sent me flowers for my birthday.”

Thor is immediately overcome with an expression of abject weirdness. “Why the fuck is Tony Stark sending you flowers for your birthday?”

“I don’t know, Thor, I’m asking _you_ why the fuck is Tony Stark sending me flowers for my birthday? You think this is my fault?”

Thor furrows his brow and gives Loki a somewhat accusatory look. “Don’t you like, talk to him?”

“Yeah, we’re friends,” Loki replies.

“That’s just encouraging him!” Thor cries, suddenly somewhere on the way to enraged.

“What are you talking about?” Loki asks, a little shocked.

“Anybody that so much as says, ‘ _Hi, Tony_ ,’ is at risk of being torpedoed by his dick and his whole fucking crazy personality,” Thor says, so mad for no reason. “And it’s even worse when you’re friends with him. Being friends with him is sitting in his lap and saying, ‘ _Ooh, Tony, please finger me_ -’”

“Dude, shut the fuck up!” Loki tosses his flowers down at the coffee table. He’s looking at Thor like he’s gone insane, and maybe he has. “What the hell is wrong with you?!”

Thor releases a short, bitter laugh. “It’s so funny that you think there’s something wrong with me and not something wrong with _Tony Stark_ -”

“It is none of your business!” Loki cries, throwing his hands crazily in the air. 

“Has he been in this house?” Thor asks, then suddenly gets a tunnel-vision look about himself, turning around and facing Loki’s bedroom. “Has he been in your room?” and then he is storming off to said room and Loki can’t help himself - he’s flinging himself at his brother, tripping him, and they are tumbling.

They are a wrestling, screaming, punching mess in the middle of the floor. Thor is beneath Loki at first, roaring and pulling viciously at Loki’s hair while Loki punches his chest and tangles their legs together. Eventually, Thor assumes supremacy of the situation as he almost always does and ends up on top of his brother, pinning him to the ground and screaming in his face about, “What is wrong with you?!” and “Stop doing this!” Wrenching his left leg away from his brother’s right, Loki cries out in pain when his ankle twists unnaturally against the floor and sends instant pain shooting through him.

“Stop it!” Loki slaps Thor’s face as hard as he can and is rewarded with a swift punch to the gut. “Thor, _fuck you_ , my ankle hurts! Stop!”

Thor shoves him away and stumbles to his feet, breathing hard. He stares down at Loki - a crumpled, writhing mess on the floor - and looks vaguely horrified at what this morning has come to, vaguely guilty in a way he doesn’t often look. Running a hand through his mane of blond hair, he asks, “Are you okay?”

“Fuck off, no I’m not!” comes Loki’s heated reply. Somehow, Loki manages to sit up; hissing in pain, he says, “I think my ankle is sprained. I need to go to the hospital.”

“Oh my God…” Thor puts his face momentarily in his hands, then scoops Loki up into his arms in one grand, smooth motion. Loki, not expecting this, immediately flounders around in his brother’s grasp, struggling to stand up on his own even knowing that he probably can’t without assistance. Thor just hangs onto him until he stills, saying, “Come on, Loki, quit it. Let’s just get in my car and go.”

Loki refuses to look Thor in the face. “Don’t you think we should put on shoes? And like, jackets?”

Thor rolls his eyes and breathes out, “God, life is so difficult.” He puts Loki down on the couch and goes to get himself together, and all the while Loki seethes - seethes at his flowers on the coffee table, seethes at Thor, seethes at the cold November morning, seethes at himself.

They make it to the emergency room eventually. Get crutches and a prescription for an anti-inflammatory that should help with the pain. When the doctor asks how this happened, Loki lies instantly, says, “I fell down the stairs.” Thor just looks at him as the words leave him, and when they’re alone, he bristles like Loki has wronged him for defending him. Whatever. He can act like a child and Loki can space out until he’s completely alone for all intents and purposes. This is just the way things are nowadays.

That night, Loki grabs all the blankets from his bed and hobbles onto the back patio. Turning on the propane-powered space heater, he swaddles himself in cotton blend comforters and his wool sweater and socks, lies back on one of the reclining lawn chairs, and opens his eyes to the clear Alaska sky. He spies Mars and Jupiter in the dark blanket pinpricked with light; he sighs, aching to be somewhere on their surfaces instead of here. He is brought willingly back to his fifteenth year, when he sat out on the marina in December for hours upon hours, chasing hypothermia and eventual cardiac arrest.

It was shortly after his birthday, which he had hated because he and Thor had argued through that day and Father had made a big deal out of being disappointed in both of them, but especially Loki. He left shortly after breakfast, because the post-breakfast hour was often one of the busiest of the household, everyone sucked into their own little projects and work and social interaction and all of that bullshit. Nobody noticed his departure, and this is how he wanted things, how he expected them to go. Of course nobody would care if he left; that was the point of this whole exercise in the first place.

He walked to the marina. It was twenty degrees Fahrenheit, which was perfect for him. As he sat on the Cook Inlet, hypothermia set in and he became very confused; he began to wander around the marina staring into the eyes of total strangers, asking where he was, taking his clothes off. The last thing he remembered before waking up in the emergency room at Alaska Regional was tripping and falling into Cook Inlet, his whole being submerged in pure ice blue, and this was a nice way to be, he supposed. Pure ice blue suited him the way nothing ever did.

They asked him at the hospital if he’d intended to kill himself. Loki hadn’t felt like lying at the time, so he told the truth and ended up an inpatient at Alaska Psychiatric Institute for a week, to get started on a good regimen of medication and therapy and be formally diagnosed bipolar with a borderline personality. As Loki snuffles into his blankets beneath the space heater tonight, cold creeping in and sending temporary chills through him, he thinks of all the kids with drug problems and behavioral issues that he encountered at Alaska Psych, the dead eyes and trading brownies for fruit at dinnertime. He thinks of pills at bedtime, the same pills he took tonight, and wanting to go home so bad it made his bones ache.

He wakes up in the morning freezing cold, his nose running, the sun shining upon him in a strawberry blonde sky. He goes back inside and turns the heat all the way up, hating himself and his ways so much it defies explanation.

On Thursday, Loki emails Dr. Gast from the safety of his bed about his midterm grade, which appears to be a C instead of the proper A. Over the course of the afternoon, the following email exchanges occur.

> **FROM:** _Loki Skywalker <lnskywal@marvel.edu>  
> _ **TO:** _Endwi Gast <gast@marvel.edu>  
> _ **SUBJECT:** _Midterm grade_
> 
> Hi, Dr. Gast.
> 
> I was just checking my grades and it appears that my midterm grade in the system is C, even though you clearly told me in class that I’d have an A. Midterm grades are based on performance and my performance has been pretty good (according to you during office hours), so I would have expected to have a higher grade. Sorry if this email comes off as confrontational, I’m just in a really bad mood and I’m on pain meds so my inhibitions are a little bit low. Sorry.
> 
> Loki Skywalker
> 
>   
>    
> 
> 
> **FROM:** _Endwi Gast <gast@marvel.edu>  
> _ **TO:** _Loki Skywalker <lnskywal@marvel.edu>  
> _ **SUBJECT:** _Re: Midterm grade_
> 
> Loki :o)
> 
> Terribly sorry to have given you the wrong impression/buggered things up in the system! You are, of course, a perfect student, the kind of student any professor would die to have. You deserve your A despite your bad mood and use of pain medication (I assume for the ankle? Big yikes). I will amend your grade immediately.
> 
> Ps: try yoga and green tea, i find it helps to destress, which relieves pain in ways you wouldn’t believe! :o)
> 
> Endwi Gast  
> Scholar of Religious Studies and Spirituality | Marvel University  
> (907) 212-4666
> 
>   
>    
> 
> 
> **FROM:** _Loki Skywalker <lnskywal@marvel.edu>  
> _ **TO:** _Endwi Gast <gast@marvel.edu>  
> _ **SUBJECT:** _Re: Midterm grade_
> 
> Thank you for the timely and pleasant response. I guess I’m flattered, and I appreciate you fixing my grade.
> 
> My ankle is still sprained, yes. I do go to yoga club meetings, but I haven’t been able to as of late because of my injury. Thanks for thinking of me anway.
> 
> Loki Skywalker

  
  


In the end, Loki’s grade is a fat, shining A. He ices his ankle, elevates it on a pillow, and wonders about Dr. Gast’s strange little life, his yoga routine and his herbal teas, his possible anti-Western medicine stance. Registration for next semester is coming up, so Loki is busy putting together his schedule, looking up call numbers for his desired classes and entering them in the system as soon as his registration time window opens up. It looks like he’s going to be one of Gast’s students again next semester; in his head, Loki congratulates himself for his achievement of perpetual academic excellence under professors who love him.

The week passes in a blur. Thanksgiving break is suddenly upon all Marvelites without warning, ushering in lots of flights back home and daydrinking that might only be a little appropriate for the break. Loki bigs a temporary goodbye to his friends and stays off of his feet for the week, RICEing his way through recovery while Thor, Sif, and the rest of their posse party steadily through every night without abandon. Then it’s Thanksgiving Day, and the Skywalkers’ annual feast is scheduled for 2:00 in the afternoon. Loki doesn’t make it home until 5:30, citing his wholesale disinterest in eating non-vegetarian food with his family while they try not to bitch at each other.

Instead of coming for dinner at the right time like a good son, Loki stays in his bed and watches _Bojack Horseman_ on Netflix for hours. In his sleep clothes and set up in bed with hummus and pita chips and a big glass of Minute Maid strawberry lemonade, he vegetates, lazy and indolent, and lets his thoughts stray as far away from his family on A Street as they possibly might dare. His ankle is getting to the point where he’s able to put weight on it, but he’s not interested in doing anything of the sort today, would much rather just act like an asshole and forget everything and everyone. An hour and a half into his rebellion of sorts, he gets a text message from the last person he was expecting to contact him on this day.

> **Today** 3:28 PM

> **tony stark  
> ** Hey friend. Happy Thanksgiving, or whatever is the polite thing to say - what are you doing today?

  
  


Loki is appalled at the instantaneousness of his lust at this missive. He doesn’t know what to do with himself, how consumed he is by the desire to fly to Tony and let him do whatever he wants to him. Months later, he is still not quite sure what Tony’s intentions are with him beyond friendship, if there are any intentions at all beyond friendship, and as a result, he is twisted into weird shapes at Tony’s every word and question, unsure of himself, deeply insecure. He contemplates Tony’s text for a long time before answering.

> **loki skywalker  
> ** happy thanksgiving/gratuitous colonizer day. [turkey emoji] [orangutan emoji] [squid emoji] i’m currently avoiding family dinner with netflix and snacks. you?
> 
> **tony stark  
> ** Your use of emojis is so fearless and weird haha. I like it. I’m with the folks in Long Island. Remember how we used to sit on my balcony for hours last summer? That’s what I’m doing now, only I’m freezing my buns off because it’s November not the middle of June lmao. 
> 
> I really wish you were here.

  
  


Loki is swamped with the urge to scream at the top of his lungs. He stares at his phone and thinks about throwing it across the room, or burying it beneath his pillow, or tossing it out the window, or otherwise turning it off. He finds that he is in the middle of a full-blown panic attack, that Tony Stark is making him have a fucking panic attack. He wants Tony so bad it’s devouring him, and if there’s a god or some benevolent entity in the universe, Tony will never find out and will instead hurt him badly and show him what’s what.

> **loki skywalker  
> ** what would we do if i were with you? i don’t think your parents would like me around for thanksgiving that much
> 
> **tony stark  
> ** Oh fuck my parents. My mom loved you, remember? She’s just weird and bipolar, you know how she is, but I’m sure she wouldn’t mind having you around if I really wanted you here
> 
> I’d say we could stare into each other’s eyes and say sweet things if I didn’t know you’d think that was way too gay
> 
> **loki skywalker  
> ** you act like it’s still last summer, honestly
> 
> **tony stark  
> ** Why can’t it be? I mean, I know things are different now, but they weren’t so bad back then. I could go for another round of Loki in Long Island, this time with less booze and maybe only a smidgen of weed because I know you need it to function ;)
> 
>   
>    
> 

Loki sinks down into the center of his bed, deaf, dumb, and blind for all intents and purposes. _How could I be such a fucking idiot_ , he wonders to himself, regretting ever meeting Tony Stark, who will with certainty ruin his life. He tries to play it casual and not respond for about five minutes, just stuffs his face with pita chips and hummus, and when he does tap out a reply on his phone, his fingers and mouth are covered with a fine dusting of crumbs.

> **loki skywalker  
> ** maybe one day [thinking face emoji]

  
  


He puts his phone down and manages not to masturbate for the next two hours. When he shows up at his parents’ house at 5:32 PM, Hela is also pulling up onto the curb in her flashy black sports car, her dressed in all-black and looking like she’s ready for the most stylish funeral there ever was.

“You look nice,” Loki says to her as they both approach the front door, him trying to be nice on this, such a familial holiday.

“Why are you coming so late?” Hela asks instead of saying thanks or something polite like that, adjusting her blazer with sharply manicured hands. “I was fucking my assistant. What’s your excuse?”

Loki shakes his head and opens the unlocked front door, hating his dark sister so much it’s unbearable. “You’re my least favorite person,” he says, and then Mother is upon him with open and encircling arms.

“Loki, darling! I was starting to worry you weren’t coming.” Mother kisses his forehead with unadulterated affection, then seems to grow bashful under Hela’s watchful, almost piercing gaze. She moves to give her stepdaughter a brief, awkward hug. “It’s good to see you too, Hela.”

“Always, Mommy,” comes Hela’s scathing reply. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Loki eats cranberry sauce and potato salad and listens to Father and Hela talk about work while Thor and Mother drink glasses of Zinfandel and discuss the weather. Nobody comments on his lateness because nobody really cares after he’s shown up. He stays long enough to have a good conversation with Mother and drives home to ice his ankle some more and sit in the bathtub not touching himself, because he has the paramount of self-control. 

The next day, it is Friday, November 24th. The Avengers start to compete in their first game in the NCAA Division II football tournament in the Yukon Conference, and everyone who left for Thanksgiving is back to cheer them on. Predictably, Amora drags Loki and Namor along so she can root for Thor and they can drink cheap, nasty beer. Namor buys a forty-ounce at the convenience store on the way to the game, and as he gets in the driver’s seat of his BMW, Loki from the backseat of the car comments, “Fully embracing redneck culture, I see.”

“Is it really redneck culture if we’re in Alaska?” Namor asks, putting the car in reverse and heading back in the direction of the football field. 

“There are rednecks in Alaska, you see them every day,” Loki replies with certainty, lighting up his joint and taking a long drag. This is what he needs to survive this night full of Thors and Tony Starks and Steve Rogerses.

Q1 starts with a bang, with Sam Wilson the running back scoring a field goal and Tony Stark and Carol Danvers tackling the shit out of the defending members of the opposing team, the Chitauri. Almost every Marvelite is there, from the Kenyan exchange students cheering on T’Challa to the Future Leaders of America alternately applauding and sneering at Steve Rogers and Tony Stark, their most and least favorite members respectively. Loki and his friends find themselves sitting high up in the bleachers with Marvel University’s other weirdos - Ulysses Klaue the political science major and the whole wrestling team, two members of which (Peter Quill and Gamora Whoberi) are sucking face in lieu of watching the game. Loki rides out his sativa high while Amora yells, “Go Avengers! Whoo!” at the top of her lungs; he’d truthfully rather be anywhere but here, but he’s not having an altogether too bad time, all things considered.

“What is the point of football, truly?” Loki asks Namor, who is the only person ostensibly listening to him at the moment. “You get a ball to one end of the field and everyone does a dance. Why all the complication in between all that? Why do we all get together and sit around and watch this shit for hours, it’s so unbelievably stupid, ugh.”

“You’re preaching to the choir, friend,” Namor comments over the lip of his forty-ounce. He takes a long, kind of worrying sip from his drink. “I prefer individual sports anyway. I miss being in Hawaii and being able to go surfing every day.”

“You’re a surfer?” Loki asks, trying to imagine tall, beautiful Namor on a board and slick with the sea.

“Of course I am,” Namor replies, almost sounding offended. “When I’m home I go almost every morning. I just put on my suit and head to the beach, no matter what the weather is or how I feel, if I’m sick, whatever. It gets so fucking stifling being in Alaska and waking up to nothing but wind and snow and cold every day.”

Loki smiles at his islander friend, his companion that is so different from him. “Sorry for the inconvenience,” he says.

Namor shakes his head and continues to nurse his beer, uninterested in being cute. Loki knows more than anything that he wants to be drunk, so he just laughs and leans into him, taking sips from his bottle every now and then when he lets him.

Q2 sees the Avengers ahead by six points. Everybody pretty much knows they’re going to win by now. Thor and Bruce Banner are the Avengers’ two linebackers, and as such, they spend the second quarter defending against the renewed attacks of the Chitauri’s offensive team. Loki doesn’t like to pretend he isn’t affected by watching Thor slam bodies into the ground like they’re made of nothing, his head protected by helmet maybe but him looking no less fragile and feral as he tramples through the opposition. Amora is on the edge of her seat as she looks on, her cries of, “ _Thor! Kill them dead!_ ” causing those seated nearby to give her curious looks.

“Great, now we’re the weird freaks who are way too into the game,” Loki comments, rolling his eyes.

“Oh my god, look at Bruce _destroying_ them,” Namor says, grabbing Loki’s attention by bumping him with his elbow. On the field, Bruce Banner is tearing Chitauris apart, flinging them from side to side and roaring like a monster, him a berserker of old. Loki winces as time runs down to zero and Carol Danvers makes a touchdown, scoring six points and putting the Avengers ever more in the lead. In celebration, Namor finishes off his forty-ounce; his voice is slightly slurred when he says, “Love to be a Marvelite.”

Then it’s halftime. The cheerleaders put on a little pep rally and the Avengers congregate at the side of the field, watching and drinking their Gatorade and interacting with the crowd gathered to cheer them on. Tony Stark finds Loki at the top of the bleachers and winks at him, giving him the OK sign with his fingers, and Loki feels his heart plummet directly into his stomach, suddenly uncertain of everything about today and himself. Amora catches this exchange and rounds on Loki immediately.

“What the hell was that?” she asks, her expression not that much obscured by her red face paint.

“That was Tony Stark, winking at me,” Loki replies evenly. “Yesterday he texted me from Long Island saying he wanted us to hang out again like we did last summer. You know, when we had sex and all that.”

“Oh my God!” Amora cries, shaking Namor to make sure he’s paying attention. “He really is the biggest douchebag of all time, and you just don’t see it!”

“Of course I see it, Amora, come on.” Loki looks down at the side of the field and sees Pepper Potts coming down from the bleachers to see Tony, and there they are, embracing right in full view of everyone. “Look, he’s hugging his girlfriend right now! Of course he’s a douchebag.”

“We’re totally going to the homecoming party tomorrow, though,” Amora says with an insistent note to her tone. “Thor is going to be there and I’m going to make my move.”

“No, you’re not,” Loki retorts immediately. “He’s dating Sif and he’s a toxic bachelor, remember?”

“We’ll see what happens,” Amora concedes, looking put out but not too much. The Avengers win 30 to 29 and everyone goes home drunk and happy.

On Saturday, there is the homecoming party at Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes, Natasha Romanoff, and Sam Wilson’s house in northern Anchorage. Namor sits this one out, citing his hangover that he seeks to treat with the hair of the dog in the privacy of his own home; Loki and Amora head out in Sleipnir by themselves, Loki still on crutches and checking his phone every now and then to make sure he’s going in the right direction. When he and Amora arrive, every person at Marvel is there, even some professors - Coach/Dr. Nick Fury is drinking beer from the keg when our darlings walk in, and Loki spies the coach of the wrestling team smoking a one-hitter on the front porch. Bloomy, percussive rock music streams from somewhere unseen, casting everything in rosy tones befitting the celebration of the Avengers’ victory.

“I think I’m going to vomit,” Loki comments to Amora as they stand in the open front doorway, surveying the tableau of dancing, drinking, smoking, and talking students and co. “Everyone I’ve ever met in my life is at this party.”

“Enjoy it, _Älskling_ ,” Amora replies, patting him on his cheek with one pretty hand. “Let’s find your brother.”

“Dude, no, I’m not in the mood for drunk and loud Thor,” Loki argues even as he follows Amora into the throng of people, the open concept living room/kitchen of this unassuming bungalow somehow large enough to accommodate about half of the student body of Marvel University. He passes Carol Danvers and Maria Rambeau dancing their beautiful asses off to noise rock, the wrestling team trying semi-successfully to start a mosh pit, Scott Lang and Hope Van Dyne sort of cutely making out in the corner, the short line of students waiting for one of the house’s two bathrooms to free up. 

“You will say hi and then you will scram,” Amora instructs Loki in her usual piercing way as they make their way out to the backyard. She looks like she’s going to say something else, but then she stops dead in her tracks with no warning, staring at something in the middle distance. Loki follows her gaze and finds Thor and Sif liplocked, their arms around each other in the middle of a fairy-lit yard full of otherwise just as happy students. He frowns, putting his hand on the small of Amora’s back.

“Come on, Amora,” he says, leading her to the corner of the yard where Peter Parker the freshman Avenger is selling beers and Solo cups of jungle juice. “Let’s just get something to drink and chill out.”

So they sip from their cans of shitty Bud Lite and chain smoke the cigarettes Amora has stashed in the pocket of her rabbit fur coat. Loki lets Amora rail against Thor at him, her cursing the man in idiomatic Swedish and swearing to make him suffer one day, or, alternately, to make him love her. Loki sort of understands the twisted impulse to want to kill and kiss Thor - the generally heightened emotions his brother always seems to elicit from just about everyone, his friends in love with him dearly, his enemies loathing him wholeheartedly. He people-watches (his favorite passtime at a Marvel function) and texts Namor about what he sees.

> **Today** 9:35 PM
> 
> **loki skywalker  
> ** justin hammer, that weasel, is breakdancing [nauseated face emoji]
> 
> i swear i just saw steve rogers kiss bucky barnes on the mouth, or at least on the face, which is kind of alarming
> 
> there are freshmen literally doing whippits (like that stuff with the whipped cream mixed with drugs and shit? at least i think that’s how that works, idk i’m just an old pothead)
> 
> omg the kenyan exchange students are so pretty it makes me want to cry. you think they all date each other?
> 
> **namor mckenzie  
> ** I had a feeling that Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes were more than just friends. What did I tell you guys about Bucky seeing Steve’s dick when they were kids? They probably still look at each other’s dicks.
> 
> Also of course the Kenyan exchange students are dating each other. Why would they date someone they’re not going home with at the end of the Spring semester? Why would they date anyone outside of their circle when they’re so beautiful?
> 
> **loki skywalker  
> ** i wish i had a hot partner that was also like NOT WHITE like me. i feel like all these pure white people just don’t get what it’s like to be me, not even amora
> 
> you get it because you’re mixed too but idk if you want to date me [thinking face emoji] [pleading face emoji]
> 
> **namor mckenzie  
> ** One day, Loki, you will date the most beautiful POC in the world, and we will all be so happy for you.
> 
> I would date you, I would, I just don’t want it to be for the wrong reasons.
> 
> **loki skywalker  
> ** that’s fair
> 
> you’re a good friend [beating heart emoji]

  
  


“Are you even listening to me?” Amora asks out of nowhere, her diatribe losing steam.

“Of course I am,” Loki replies, only halfway lying.

At that moment, Tony Stark emerges through the crowd like an angel, holding a Solo cup full of what Loki assumes isn’t an alcoholic beverage. He smiles at Loki as soon as he sees him, approaches him and Amora with a gaiety to him that’s kind of rare for him, to be honest. 

“You came,” Tony says triumphantly, sitting right next to Loki and putting a friendly hand on his shoulder. He leans around Loki’s body to say, “Hi, Amora.”

Amora gives him a facetious salute with two fingers. “ _Hallå_ ,” she pronounces in her native Swedish. 

“I didn’t think you guys were the celebrate after a football game kind of people,” Tony remarks.

“Oh no, we love football, right Amora?” Loki says.

Amora nods, looking deeply displeased. Tony peers curiously at her, but doesn’t comment - instead, he asks, “Can I bum a cig off of you guys?”

Loki reaches into Amora’s pocket and retrieves the box of cigarettes, then one lonely American Spirit. He hands Tony the cigarette and his ironic American flag lighter, watches Tony light up and feels, weirdly enough, full of air and life. The light of the brief flame plays over Tony’s face so prettily; Loki is warm as Tony hands him back his lighter and exhales a thick cloud of smoke.

“These are the shit,” Tony comments around the butt of his cig. “They’ve got flavor. I swear I’m only able to get through sobriety with these little things.”

“That’s depressing,” Loki says without much heat or accusation. 

“It’s the truth,” Tony replies with a wink. The air is crisp - almost too crisp on this end of November in Alaska night - but Loki has a furnace within him kindled by this weird friend of his. He takes a puff off of his own cigarette and enjoys the subtle intimacy of the moment, of Tony chattering to him about the game yesterday and Amora’s hand in his on his other side. He wishes the moment, unremarkable as it is, could last forever, uninterrupted by judgment, school, mental illness, or society.

Then, just as Tony arrived (all at once, with no warning), Pepper Potts materializes in front of them, carrying her own cup of something and looking as she always does - slightly frazzled, but mostly calm. She smiles at Tony as she draws near, says, “If I’d known you were going to just take a smoke break I would have stayed with you.”

“And leave Rhodey all alone?” Tony asks, grinning brilliantly. “No, I’m glad you’re here. Come hang out.”

Loki feels his heart shatter, and it’s the stupidest thing imaginable. He is profoundly othered in the presence of Pepper - Tony’s perfect, best American girl from Long Island, Loki just a weird genderqueer Eskimo kid in the scalp of the continental United States. He squeezes Amora’s hand, and they give each other a tortured look, both of them scorned in the face of the football players they love so much. He leans against his friend, and there are her hands in his silky black hair, soothing him, circling him down into the calmest part of himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> who wants a story about the kenyan exchange students? or steve, bucky, natasha, and sam? or the wrestling team? or even carol and maria? stay tuned.


	5. DECEMBER

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> merry christmas, yo. if nobi is reading this, i hope she's enjoying it.

#  _ DECEMBER _

The northern lights show up in December. Brilliant swathes and patches of green and chartreuse streak across the night sky, painting the night in verdant colors. On the first night of December, the Avengers play their second game against the Machine Men, and the aurora borealis is there to greet them and all the other Marvelites that come out to watch them play. Loki watches the spectacle from his apartment in Northern Anchorage, standing outside on the back patio and gazing up into the Technicolor sky with some strange feeling holding mass inside his heart. 

Thor breaks up with Sif the day after The Avengers win again. Loki knows this because the next day, Thor dresses really nice and puts little braids into his hair so he can go on a date with Jane Foster, the astrophysics major he once dated as a sophomore. As Loki recalls it that relationship ended because of the same communication issues all Thor’s romantic entanglements are dominated by, not to mention some sexual compatibility stuff that he heard through the grapevine (apparently Jane isn’t quite as adventurous as the likes of Sif or Valkyrie). He watches Thor put on cologne and rub dry shampoo into his beard and feels as though he is looking at a person he’s never seen before, some stranger that has skinned his brother and put him on like a suit. 

“What about Sif?” he asks from the bathroom doorway.

Thor’s expression changes to one of vague sorrow. “Sif will get over it,” he says in an even tone. “She always does.”

Depressing, but true. Loki steps out of the doorway and goes to find something to quench his thirst in the kitchen.

Mother is frantic now that it’s Yuletide. Every day she calls Loki more than once, sometimes more than twice, trying to coordinate Christmas gift shopping because that is so desperately her bag. “I was thinking about getting your father a nice pair of gloves - you know how he likes to wear gloves when he goes hunting - but then I realized, he already has so many pairs of gloves that another one would just be superfluous! Excessive, even gaudy. So what did you think you were going to get for him?”

“I don’t know, a tie with a dog on it,” Loki replies without thinking. He’s sitting in his bed trying to read his Art and Mythology text and managing to come away having retained zero information. He needs to get high, truth be told. 

“Oh, Loki,” Mother says, sounding unimpressed but in a loving way. “Your father does love ties.”

“What’s the point of gift-giving at Christmas, anyway?” Loki asks, and again with the  _ what’s-the-point _ questions. “By the time we’re all adults we have everything we need anyway, and it’s hard enough figuring out what everybody wants if they don’t outright come and tell you, and unless you enjoy a close relationship it’s damn near impossible to give them something thoughtful and significant, so why do we do it all in the first place?”

Mother sounds unspeakably sad when she says, “I so wish you and your father were closer than you are.” She makes a soft noise in the back of her throat, something damp, laden heavily with sorrow. “It’s a shame that you two have fallen out as you have.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what happens when a guy raises his son the way Father raised me,” Loki replies with only a hint of regret.

“I’m nodding,” Mother says, then emits a low sigh. She is speechless for a moment, then her voice is light and thoughtful once again. “I was at Rusty Raven yesterday and I saw the most beautiful globe, and I thought, ‘how nice, I’ll get a globe for your father.’”

Loki listens and  _ hmm _ s and replies when appropriate. He reflects on how much he kind of hates the Christmas season, the way it forces families together when apart might be the more desirable state of things. It is Thanksgiving 2 , and he’d rather sleep through the entire five weeks than go through the necessary shopping, eating, talking, singing, reminiscing, being a good person-ing. He hangs up on his mother feeling exhausted, and immediately goes into the living room to find his pipe and a pinch of Gorilla Glue.

On Wednesday, December 6th, Loki and Thor go Christmas shopping at the Dimond Center. They take Thor’s Hummer, again because it is more suitable for shopping than Sleipnir. The Dimond Center is the place of their many childhood romps, its many shops delectable to their young consumerist eyes, its ice-skating rink the stuff of their wintry dreams. They used to go ice-skating there every single winter from the time they were seven/eight to the time they were twelve/thirteen; Loki remembers that last time they visited, how he was a beautiful slipstream song on the ice in his green plaid pea coat and his sleek white skates, and Thor barrelled along like a big dumb yeti, no better at skating than he was the year before.

“You have to just let yourself fall when you feel yourself losing balance,” Loki said to his brother then, twirling a little as he came to the place on the rink where Thor was currently stumbling around, clinging pathetically to the wall. He put his hand in Thor’s and held him steady. “Just bend your knees and plop down on your butt. Then push yourself up with your feet between your hands.”

“How do you know all this?” Thor asked gruffly, giving him sort of a stormy look, him so envious of Loki’s grace and skill where this was concerned.

“I just figured it out, I guess.” Loki was good at doing that. Thor was too, which is what made them such a good team back in those days. Loki squeezed Thor’s mittened hand with his own, then drew him forward along the curvature of the rink’s circumference, gentle yet swift. Together they glided around the rink as black and white skaters with their hands in each other’s hands, and the day was perfect - the perfectest one they’d known that winter.

This winter, no such camaraderie exists between brothers. Loki and Thor barely speak as they pop into jewelry and apparel stores looking for good, shiny things to bring home to their parents, for watches and rings and bracelets and even a beautiful peacock scarf Loki knows Mother would love, though she has so many similar scarves already. Loki fingers the scarf thoughtfully, weighing the pros and cons of getting his mother something completely thoughtless and, in her words, superfluous. He passes on it eventually, moving to the part of the shop where all the fancy ties with exotic animals on them lie.

Eventually, he and Thor reunite at Chili’s, another site of their friendship of days long past. Weighed down with shopping bags, they find a booth in an unoccupied corner of the restaurant and sit on opposite sides of the table. A waitress jots down their drink orders; when Thor asks for a frozen margarita, Loki allows his eyebrows to become one with his hairline.

“Okay, dude,” he says as the bouncy little waitress bounces on away, perusing his appetizer menu for Awesome Blossom onion petals and other vegetarian options for nachos and cheese fries. “It’s like three o’clock in the afternoon. Margarita time doesn’t arrive till six or seven.”

“Says you,” Thor retorts, looking through his own menu. Chili’s is Thor’s type of place, as the meat and cheese are abundant and the alcohol is just as flavorful as it is plentiful. He is likely in heaven skimming through twelve-ounce sirloin steaks and massive, dripping burgers and fajitas galore; there’s a look of drunk happiness on his face already as he says, “Any time is margarita time if you believe it in your heart.”

“Sounds like the strawman alcoholic’s motto, but whatever.” Loki flips the page and is assaulted with pictures of succulent cuts of beef, dribbly yellow cheese dip, bacon ranch chicken quesadillas. “You do you.”

Thor looks at Loki for a long, medium-intense moment, not speaking, simply watching him make faces at his menu. He makes a disgruntled noise in his throat and turns back to his menu, shaking his head. “You’re one to talk.”

“What do you mean?” Loki asks, trying to be casual about it and kind of failing. He cannot help the note of blind anger that bleeds into his tone, the way every time he and Thor disagree about anything it sort of feels like the world is ending.

“You’re fueled by substances, too,” Thor replies, giving Loki an even and somewhat judgmental look that makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up. “I see how much weed you smoke. That’s not just you kicking back and having a bowl every now and then. That’s every single day, multiple times a day, like medication. I don’t even know how you afford it.”

Loki feels profoundly scrutinized, naked. He frowns severely at his brother, says, “So you’re saying that I’m no better than you are because I smoke weed every day.”

“Of course,” Thor replies. His expression turns expressly confused. “Why, did you think you were better than me?”

Loki’s first impulse is to answer in the affirmative, but then he actually thinks about the question and finds himself stumped.  _ Is  _ he better than Thor? Is his disgusting form, his horrendously black soul better or worse than Thor’s wanton hedonism and inborn sense of egocentrism, his way of barreling through life crushing everything and everyone in his path? Thor is not more or less intelligent than he is, and he is certainly stronger and more well-liked. Loki hides his mouth behind his drink, slurping from his strawberry lemonade and shaking his head a little. “I don’t know, Thor. I don’t know what I thought.”

Thor looks somewhat chastened by this. He closes his menu and runs a hand through his hair. “What did you get for Mom and Dad?” he asks.

Loki closes his menu as well, having made his decision on his order. “I really kind of want it to be a surprise for everyone. Well, in Mom’s case. Dad, I just got some ties.”

“That’s kind of fucked up,” Thor comments with an absurd smile.

“Oh, boohoo.” Loki crosses his arms and looks away, across the restaurant, where waitresses bustle around and families abide. “He’s gotten me a journal like every year for the past seven years and I’m like, goddammit, Dad, I have a blog and a notes app on my phone, I don’t fucking need another fucking journal.”

“He’s just trying to get to know you better, Loki,” Thor says, sounding halfway like he doesn’t even believe it himself.

“Why are you defending him?” Loki asks, seizing upon this hint of insincerity. “He treats you like shit, too. Don’t tell me you don’t go hurtling back to every time he reamed you out whenever you hear someone raise their voice or even display any sign of displeasure in any way, or that you don’t wake up in cold sweats some nights just from dreaming of him yelling at you.”

Thor gives him a look like he’s gone mental. “No, man, that sounds like a you problem. Are you seeing a therapist? It sounds like you need to see a therapist.”

Loki shrugs, lowering his gaze to the tabletop and refusing to look at Thor. This is why it’s been so hard to talk to him since they hit high school - where Thor once understood him implicitly, nowadays it seems like all he does is judge him.

Eventually, their orders of honey-chipotle ribs, vegetarian nachos, Texas cheese fries, Caesar salad, and loaded mashed potatoes come around, and each brother is more busy with eating than talking to the other. Loki drowns in the feeling of weirdness that accompanies eating a meal with his brother for the first time since September, really (Thanksgiving doesn’t count since he came and ate after everyone else had already finished). He watches Thor gorge himself on his ribs and cheese fries with something like envy and disgust pooling in his gut, him so jealous of Thor’s ability to enjoy himself at every opportunity. Without thinking, he takes a sip from Thor’s margarita; Thor gives him a strange look.

“What the hell was that?” he asks.

“I was feeling impulsive,” Loki explains without looking at Thor, shoving a forkful of nachos in his mouth. He chews and Thor watches him, and the moments that pass between them are tight with some unidentifiable emotion, something that has existed between them for years which they’ve never given a name. 

Thor sounds like he wants to give it a name when he asks, “What happened to us, Loki?”

Loki lies through his teeth with practiced ease. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah, you do. You act like you’re all big and bad but you used to cry a lot, Loki, and you used to talk about everything under the sun, but now you’re just all sneaky and weird and you hate me for some reason.” Thor has momentarily moved on from his food, him simply picking at his cheese fries with his fork as he says this. He takes a long gulp from his margarita, and he watches Loki closely as he says, “Something changed somewhere along the way and now you’re a different person.”

“Am I different or have you just not changed?” Loki asks in his piercing, kind of mean way, finally looking Thor straight in his face as they speak.

Thor adopts a perplexed, thoughtful expression; he actually looks like he’s thinking hard about Loki’s question before he says with such affirmation, “Both.” The blond is bigger and prettier than he ever has been, with the longest hair and the most beautiful, heartstopping footballer’s grin, but he really is no different than he was in high school with the sore exception of how much alcohol he consumes on a daily basis and the level of fuckery he seems to wreak in his day-to-day life. Loki knows this in his marrow, which is why he asked the question that he did.

Loki shrugs, not really wanting to have the conversation about how he’s a changed person and where oh where did the old Loki go. He has his last filling bite of nachos and decides to save the rest for later; grabbing his strawberry lemonade and taking a sip, he shakes his head and says, “Shit happens. Be happy we spent time together today because it’s not going to happen again until Christmas, dear friend.”

“Why not?” Thor asks, and then, before Loki can answer, follows up the first question with another - “Why do you always do that?”

“Do what?” Loki asks.

“You build this wall around yourself every time someone tries to have anything close to a moment with you,” Thor replies, now having completely abandoned his food. “It’s like as soon as we’re actually talking about something, you’re suddenly thousands of miles away and I don’t know what happened to make you go there.”

Part of Loki desperately wants to give in to this and declare himself the loser. He wants Thor to be his brother again, for him to be present and give a fuck, and he wants to be mentally healthy and undamaged, and he wants to be safe and fine and happy. He knows that he’s never going to achieve these things and the elusive goal his psychiatrist calls “recovery,” but the really silly, sad part of him that’s still twelve years old believes that if he and Thor can be brothers again, he will be perfect.

But he and Thor won’t be brothers again. Duh.

“I’m just a private person,” he explains in his most clinical tone, shrugging again and spying the restaurant for their waitress so he might ask her to bring him a doggy bag and the check. “I’m a private person and I don’t give a shit about how comfortable other people feel anymore, so I do whatever I want.”

Thor looks genuinely crestfallen at this response. “Where’d you get your conscience, huh? I’m pretty sure you were gypped.”

Loki shoots Thor a highly unimpressed look. “Please don’t say that word, that’s so racist.”

Thor’s brow furrows in confusion. “... ‘ _ conscience _ ’?”

“No, addlepate, ‘ _ gypped _ .’” Loki rolls his eyes so hard it physically hurts. “It’s like you don’t know anything at all.”

They both go home with a little food and a lot to think about. Loki stores his Christmas presents in his closet, then shoots a text to Mother, hoping it will reduce the number of frantic phone calls he’s been getting all week.

  
  


**Today** 4:39 PM

**loki skywalker**

thor and i just finished shopping for christmas presents. you can relax now.

**mother**

Thank you [sparkling heart emoji] my darling baby [baby emoji]

  
  


Finals week comes up really fast. The Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday prior, Loki and Amora are glued to their textbooks at the library front desk, in the living room and on its floor in the Akerman/McKenzie apartment, at the little tables at the campus Starbucks, even in the moments before and after the yoga club meeting is fully in swing. Amora reads flashcards to Loki while he drives, prompting him to explain each concept and topic in full detail. He writes papers in his bed, vibrating away, and drinks the customary amount of coffee to drink during and just before finals week (that is, five cups per day).

The Friday before finals week, the Avengers play the Dark Elves from Whitehorse and summarily whoop their asses good, mostly thanks to Thor. Of course, there’s another party to celebrate their victory (this one considerably smaller than the last, but large enough that someone like Loki gets an invite from Tony Stark). Loki declines to go in favor of reading his in-class notes, flashcards, and textbooks until his eyes are bloodshot and raw and he has to make a mad dash for the Visine in the medicine cabinet. Thor comes home that night covered in grass stains and mud beneath his bulky winter parka, and he brings with him his whole posse of friends (including Sif, who has apparently gotten over the whole Jane situation).

“Great,” Loki says to Fenris as the cacophony of friends fills the apartment beyond his bedroom door. “Now I won’t be able to sleep for the next four hours.”

Fenris gives him a sympathetic look and jumps up onto the bed to nuzzle his face into Loki’s stomach, making little  _ boof boof _ noises all the while. Loki sighs and cuddles with his big old puppy, wondering how he’s going to get through the next week.

Then it’s officially finals week. Loki has two exams in a row on Monday morning, back to back classes of Art and Mythology and Anthropology of Religion. Afterward, he runs home and smokes two whole bowls of Animal Cookies, trying to obliterate the anxiety that comes with two consecutive hours of testing. He thanks the higher power in the room that his next exam is on Wednesday, then passes into Tuesday with a clear head and a sense of confidence in his academic abilities that might rival Tony Stark’s.

Speaking of Tony Stark…

Wednesday, December 13th. Loki meets Tony for coffee between Loki’s Religion and Media class and his three-to-five shift behind the library desk. They stand together in the Starbucks line, making small talk about their exams and the final they have the next day in Science of Sexual Orientation. As Loki orders a matcha green tea latte and a chocolate croissant, Tony lingers almost uncomfortably close to his side, holding his credit card, the one he got from his daddy. Then they’re finding a table in the little cafe area, sitting down in their winter clothes with their food and their books.

“I love how you just wave around your credit card like, ‘ _ ooh, look at me, I’m Tony Stark and I’m a billionaire _ ,’” Loki teases as Tony pulls his leather jacket off to reveal the black health gothique hoodie he’s wearing beneath. He brings his latte up to his lips and, before taking a long sip, asks, “How many coffees do you think you could buy with all the money in your bank account right now?”

Tony stares hard at his espresso macchiato. “Probably about five thousand giga-trillion,” he says. “That’s a real number. I almost went to MIT.” He winks.

Loki permits himself to laugh just a little. He rips a hunk off of his chocolate croissant and pops it into his mouth, chewing and savoring the sweet bread, okay with just enjoying this in front of Tony. He finally thinks he’s reached the point of near-total comfort with Tony, even as he knows nothing about the true nature of their relationship and Tony’s intentions. “How are you?” he asks. “Unless, you know, you don’t want to talk about it in which case what was the point of coffee?”

Tony has a wry look on his face, something strangely caught between pain and utter amusement. He takes one long, somewhat ridiculous sip from his coffee (an espresso, at that), and then, when he surfaces, says, “I could lie to you like I’ve been lying to you for the past two months, but then that would be so inappropriate and unfair to you.”

Loki feels something still within him, his heartbeat going slow and heavy. “What do you mean, the past two months?”

Tony laughs exuberantly - this somehow the worst possible reaction he could have had - and he is wired and alive and breathtakingly anxious as he leans forward across the table and says, “Sobriety. It’s getting kind of weird.” He smiles, each tooth an ache. “It’s always been weird, okay, which is why I said I was lying to you. I was acting like it was all great and easy, and to tell you the truth, it hasn’t been. I haven’t wanted to smoke a bowl so bad since I was thirteen.”

Loki wants to laugh, honestly. He’d had a sneaking suspicion for so very long that Tony’s facade of great peace, Zen, and emotional maturity was just bullshit, as everything Tony says and does is bullshit. “You can smoke weed, Tony, it’s not going to spiral off into you smoking rock,” he says.

“Yes it will,” Tony retorts without missing a beat, snatching up his coffee to take another sip. “Marijuana is a gateway drug.”

“Oh, God, shut up,” Loki groans.

“Do you remember the way I used to be?” Tony asks, his voice slightly strained from having throated so much coffee so fast. He looks abruptly sad and irritated at the same time. “Do you remember when I was drowning in white girl and I couldn’t get out?”

Loki does. “White girl,” as Tony says, was the street name for cocaine, which had been Tony’s drug of choice since he was a teenager in Long Island trying to simultaneously live up to and get back at his dad. Loki remembers Tony manic with the added stimulus of two bumps of cocaine, driving ninety in a fifty mile-per-hour zone, warring with his roommates until they all devolved into physical violence, the blood trailing a river from his nose down over his lips and chin. Loki remembers this and shudders, says, “Yes,” and drinks his latte.

Tony scrabbles a hand through the mess of his feathery brown hair, upsetting his slight pompadour. “Then there’s the whole thing with Pep,” he says, then releases a slightly strangled laugh and sings in sublime fashion, “ _ Me and my girl, we got this relationship _ .”

Loki furrows his brow, scowling a little. “Is it really that bad?”

“It’s not, it’s really not,” Tony replies, then completely contradicts himself by frowning and saying, “She’s just the way she is, you know. She likes beige furniture and button-down shirts. She’s a business major.”

“Your dad was a business major,” Loki points out without missing a beat.

“Pepper wants to start a business that provides virtual assistance to high-profile clients,” Tony says, each word dripping with scorn. “She wants to be a secretary for the rest of her life.”

“Oh, then she’s perfect for you.” Loki allows himself to be mean like this, relishes it even. Tony doesn’t seem altogether too affected by it.

Instead, he nurses his coffee thirstily and watches Loki with something similar to that same thirst in his gaze. Loki squirms a little uncomfortably beneath the force of such a gaze, munching on his chocolate croissant and glancing out of the window to the quad where students are traversing in their winter clothes. Pepper is style section, shiny hair, Vera Wang, kitten heels and a latte for the boss in her hand, and he is cannabis nuggets on the living room carpet with black on his nails and around his eyes, a fucking Eskimo (which only he could call himself without it being offensive), a scholar and a profoundly mentally ill person. Tony eventually shakes his head and finishes off his coffee in a record four minutes, then says, “Anyway, it’s whatever. This is just how relationships are. You can’t expect to get everything from one person.”

This strikes Loki’s ear as kind of odd. Mid-chew, he gives Tony a kind of probing look, asking  _ WTF _ with his eyes. Tony simply stares back with an ambiguous look on his face.

“What do you mean by that?” Loki asks, his voice somewhat low.

“Oh, you know.” Tony makes a dismissive gesture with his hand. “When one person fails to satisfy completely you just go looking for someone else. Not in a permanent sense. You just have to spend time with other people, you know?”

It is all so confusing and vague that Loki wants to scream. He suddenly doesn’t want to drink this latte that Tony bought for him, suddenly doesn’t want the last two bites of his croissant, suddenly tires of Starbucks entirely. He wants to run home. 

“I guess I know what you mean,” he half-lies, knowing as he does that Tony is a grade-A bullshitter and an asshole of the highest order.

Tony gives him a slow, terrible smile. “I’m on top of the world by all accounts, but I’m miserable,” he says, in a honeyed and sweet voice that makes Loki ever more scared of him. “You wanna come be miserable with me?”

That’s it. Loki has heard and felt enough. 

“I actually have to go,” he lies, tapping his nonexistent wristwatch and picking up all of his books and food. “I have work and I need to study and - yeah.” He stands, watching how Tony’s expression morphs into one of absolute shock and disappointment.

“Let me help you,” Tony says in a dazed way, standing himself and moving to take some of Loki’s books from him.

“No, no, I got it, thanks.” Loki steps back and away from Tony, putting a good yard and a half between them. He forces an uncomfortable smile. “This has been fun.”

And then he is gone, leaving Tony cold and alone and so, so “miserable” in his wake. He has no idea what he’s doing, and he doesn’t know why, but somehow he feels he has dodged certain and complete danger.

On Friday, December 15th, the Avengers play the X-Men from Salem, Massachusetts - the only other co-ed college football team in the continental United States. They’re superstars on the field, the crowd going wild in the stands, the X-Men putting up a hell of a fight in response. Loki knows he’s ready to stop being friends with Tony Stark the modern-day man when Amora texts him that the Avengers are losing twenty-to-one in the second quarter. He doesn’t give a shit about the score on the scoreboard; he’s just tired of being whipped around in Hurricane Tony.

On the first day of Christmas break, Loki drives Amora to his father’s father’s airport. They exchange presents in the car: dueling, unlabeled playlists burned onto CD-RWs, each expressly meant to make each other weep. Loki also presents Amora with a necklace with a dangling emerald pendant, and she stuffs a bouquet of poinsettias into his arms.

“I’m literally going to cry right now instead of later,” Loki says in a choked voice, his face full of red flowers. “You know how hard-pressed I am to cry, now.”

“Going to be a little bitch like you were on the night of the ballet?” Amora asks, her own face wet. She dangles her new necklace in the air. “Come now, help me put this on.”

Afterward, Loki drives back to the Akerman-McKenzie residence with Amora’s playlist on at  _ 40 _ volume. “ _ True love will find you in the end _ ,” Daniel Johnston sings to him in his strange, childlike voice, and yes, in the dark of the car, Loki does find that his eyes grow wet. “ _ You'll find out just who was your friend _ .” Namor greets him with a bottle of pinot when he arrives on the doorstep for the second time tonight, putting his arm around him and saying, “Come on, you old crybaby.”

Thirty minutes later, Loki is blitzed and twirling around on the stool in front of the island in the kitchen, his tears flowing freely. “I miss Amora already,” he says, sniffling and wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “She’s my best friend and I don’t know what I’d do without her. I feel so alone without her here.”

Namor gazes at him over his glass of wine, giving him a soft and loving look. “I’m here,” he notes gently.

“I know,” Loki says, laughing sadly. “It’s just that I love women, love Amora, for the easy and free way she loves. It’s not like with men, where everything is tempered and hard and technical; women laugh and their bodies and hands are soft and inviting, and I love that, like, so much.”

Namor seems to permit himself to smile. “You can always call her,” he says.

“It’s not the same as being able to just come here and sleep in her bed and like, watch her put stupid clothes on the cat,” Loki retorts.

“I can put my tie on him if it’ll make you feel better,” Namor offers, looking around for the cat as he says it. There he is - a black feline with a bushy tail, slinking around the corner into the room on silent paw pads. 

Loki smiles at Namor with damp eyes. “I love you so much.”

Namor winks and gives him that Mona Lisa smile of his. “I know,” he gloats.

“Do you want to go make out and fall in love and move to some obscure island nation where you and Amora and I can all get married in a freakish group ceremony?” Loki asks with a note of hysterical hope to his voice.

“You’re sweet, my dear,” Namor purrs. “And in fact you’re just my style, but…”

“But?”

“You’re very drunk.” Namor pats Loki’s hand. “Maybe another day.”

Loki laughs and cries at once. “I don’t trust anyone like I trust you,” he admits, and sleeps in Amora’s bed that night in lieu of driving home drunk.

It’s two days into Christmas break. Loki is having coffee at the stroke of eleven o’clock when Thor comes into the room in his sleep clothes, awake hours before he usually would be on a weekend or a break. Loki doesn’t look up from his phone when Thor comes up to him and says, “Dad called. He wants me to come to brunch with him and Hela.”

Yikes. “Good luck,” Loki says over his coffee, scrolling down his Tumblr feed with his thumb. “Have fun.”

Thor gives him a sort of dull, unimpressed look. “He wanted you to come, too. Said it was important that we get together as a family.”

Loki wants to throw his hands in the air and say, ‘“We’re  _ not _ a family - you sprained my fucking ankle,” but instead he asks, “Did he say what restaurant?”

Thor has a reserved look about him. “You know he likes Simon and Seafort’s.”

Loki releases a whale of a sigh. “I’ll put on a nice sweater.”

So they go to brunch. Loki is almost too much of an Eskimo for the place, his roasted cashew skin a shade darker than everyone else’s. It is the first time he has seen or talked to his father in weeks, and it’s so awkward shaking the man’s hand before they head off to their table in a nice, well-lit place in the restaurant; so awkward sitting next to Thor opposite his father and his sister once they’re there.

“How are you, Dad?” Thor asks, sounding kind and certain. “How’s work?”

“Oh, it’s splendid,” Father replies as Hela rolls her eyes at his left, her miming choking herself at Loki outside of his field of vision. “We’re moving full steam ahead despite conflicts on the board, and I’ve just designed three new subdivisions.”

“That’s pretty great,” Thor says, meaning it. Loki desperately wants to be anywhere but here, listening to his brother and his father talk about their lives.

They order Bloody Marys, mimosas, and appetizers. Oven roasted crab and artichoke dip with warm bread, country-fried calamari, Alaskan ceviche. Loki listens and watches Hela make ugly faces as Thor and Father talk about work and school and Thor’s plans after graduation. When Father mentions gifting Thor with a graduation trip to wherever he pleases (possibly even back to the old country, also known as Norway), Hela gets this sort of manic look on her face and says, “I never got a graduation trip.” Her smile is snide, her canines extra pointy, and venom is in great abundance in her tone as she purrs at Thor, “Enjoy it, golden son.”

“Where would you go?” Father asks, sort of brushing Hela off as he is well-accustomed to doing. “I hope you’ll consider Oslo.”

“I was thinking more like New Mexico,” Thor replies without thinking, his voice casual. “There’s a lot of cool weather and stargazing stuff down there in the summer and I’d love to just post up in a small town, get drunk every night at the local bar, and look at the sky and just mark down what I see.”

Father scowls behind his beard. He is a man who requires things to be the way he wants them to be, and of course, Thor’s answer does not satisfy. “I see,” is all he says, and in those two words there is so much disapproval and disdain that Loki could vomit and they’re not even directed at him. He is content to fade into the background, to munch on his calamari and act as though he does not exist.

Brunch arrives. Smoked salmon bisque for Loki, eggs Benedict, ribs, and frittata for the rest of the family. As the meal progresses, attention shifts uncomfortably to Loki, who tries as best as he can to deflect, deflect, deflect.

“How are you, son?” Father asks in his most munificent tone, turning to Loki as he digs into his hollandaise eggs and potatoes. “How are things?”

Loki thinks hard on his sprained ankle last month and the whirlwind of finals and  _ ugh _ , Tony Stark and all that mess. He spoons bisque into his mouth and says, “I’m doing okay,” and that’s it, that’s all he has to say.

Father is interested in more, however. “How are your studies?”

“They’re interesting.”

“Interesting enough to enjoy for the rest of your life?”

“Until I get bored and find something else equally as intriguing.” Truthfully, Loki hasn’t given much thought to alternate life plans. Ever since he entered the sixth grade and fixed his gaze permanently on academia, this has been it for him and he has been satisfied with it. In another life, he could have been a businessman in his father’s firm, a fashion designer, an actor, but this happens to be the universe where he chose to pledge himself to scholarship. He doesn’t feel like going into that with his father, though, so he doesn’t.

Of course, Hela isn’t there for a nice, calm family meal. Hela is there for shits and giggles.

“It’s a shame neither of you could go into architecture,” she remarks in a mock-casual tone, and Loki could honestly wring her neck. He could. “I know Father so laments that you aren’t coming to Asgard.”

“I do,” Father says almost immediately, his expression suddenly hard and a little angry. “You both would have been great, Thor especially.”

Loki imagines a world where he decided to work at Asgard after graduation and rose in his Father’s favor to become his favorite son. He shudders a little, and doesn’t comment on it.

Thor, on the other hand, is just frowning into his ribs. “I can do what I want, Dad,” he says, and Hela’s pale eyes are immediately going to Father, anticipating his reaction with glee.

“You certainly can,” says Odin Skywalker. “You are your own man.” The words mask so much disappointment, and Loki kind of wants to cry for Thor.

After the meal, while Father pays and Thor goes off to the bathroom to take a piss and pull his hair out or whatever, Loki and Hela go outside to smoke a cigarette. Normally Loki doesn’t indulge in nicotine or tobacco, but after a brunch like this, he needs it. Hela hands him an elegant Djarum Black, watching him and saying, “So how are you, really? I know you lie to the old man to make him feel magnanimous.”

“It’s not really for his benefit,” Loki notes around the butt of his cigarette, bringing out his lighter that he coincidentally has all the time, being a pothead. 

“Oh, really?” Hela pauses to light her own cigarette, then asks, smoke escaping her mouth, “Why, then, do you lie? It’s such an unbecoming habit.”

Loki looks at his sister. She is beautiful in all black, her taste as dark if not darker than his. “I don’t want him to know about my life or how I feel or what I’m doing,” he replies. “Why would I tell him when he’s just going to judge me?”

“Who cares if he judges you?” Hela is tall and proud as she says this, as she adds with authority, “I mean, you’re a pathetic weasel with no moral backbone-”

“You!” Loki cries. “Talking about morality!”

“But you’re the shit, Loki,” Hela says, certain and true. “Fuck what he thinks. Why does he get all the power?”

“He doesn’t,” comes Loki’s slightly defensive remark.

“You say that, but you hide from him just so you don’t have to suffer his scorn. Tell me who’s the one in control in this relationship.”

Loki considers this for a long time. He doesn’t answer because he knows Hela, as always, has a point.

It is bitingly cold outside. In his faux-fur-lined parka, Loki feels profoundly Alaskan and at least a little warm, though the frosty air bites at his face and hands. Eventually, he feels cheeky and looks at his sister and asks, “How goes the plan for world domination?”

Hela blows a stream of smoke from her mouth, her makeup smoky and severe. “We’ve reached a standstill,” she says. “Odin refuses to merge with Svartalfheim and the board is divided.”

“Isn’t that kind of your jam?” Loki asks without knowing the answer truly. “Divided we fall and all that jazz?”

“I don’t want us to fall, pet,” Hela retorts in a condescending tone. “I want us to rise up and overthrow that old sack of shit.” She’s been planning to usurp her father’s place as the head of the board ever since she first started working at Asgard - likely even since she was an angry teenager neglected by her much-loved daddy. It’s the one thing she actually cares about.

Loki raises his cigarette in cheers. “Good luck to you.”

Hela smirks, cocky and beautiful. “I don’t need luck. I have cunning and ambition, and unlike you, I’m willing to use them in the real world instead of at some dead-end university for the rest of my life.”

Loki rolls his eyes and mumbles, “You are so like him.”

“Excuse me?”

“You are so like dad and you don’t even know it,” he clarifies in a louder voice, unafraid to hurt his sister’s feelings, if she even has any.

Hela looks taken aback in a rare, significant way. She says, “I’m so much better than him,” and saying it, she sounds like the child Loki so often feels like when he’s with his father and his brother.

“Yeah,” he says, taking a drag off his cigarette. “You are.”

Three days before Christmas, the Avengers play their final game. Rah rah, hoo hoo, everyone emerges victorious and there’s an afterparty-cum-Christmas party the next night at Tony Stark’s fabulous house. Tony texts Loki asking him to come, but Loki declines to go or even answer at all in favor of lying in bed in front of a good documentary and texting Namor, who updates him every five minutes or so.

  
  


> **Today** 7:59 PM
> 
> **namor mckenzie  
> ** Just got here and Tony Stark and Pepper Potts are arguing about what music is on. For some reason Pepper thinks Snoop Dogg is inappropriate?
> 
> Hilarious
> 
> Steve Rogers is delicious holy shit. I want to have his children, is that weird?
> 
> I could be like a seahorse
> 
> Ew freshmen making out get the Clorox
> 
> Kenyan exchange students making out ayyyy, we were right they are dating each other. It’s T’Challa and a girl too, they make a really beautiful couple. Maybe I should tell them that
> 
> No I’m drunk and I miss Amora [crying face emoji]
> 
> Loki why is everyone in here a couple. Why is the whole university couples
> 
> Thor and Jane Foster are outside. They look happy.
> 
> **loki skywalker  
> ** what do you mean happy?
> 
> **namor mckenzie  
> ** They’re just standing together with their arms around each other, smiling and moving to the music a little. Jane is going home for Xmas tonight I heard her say it. I think Thor is driving her

  
  


Loki reflects on this tiny facet of his brother’s life that he has absolutely no right to be privy to. He curls up beneath his heavy quilt, pets Fenris on the head, and texts Namor back.

  
  


> **loki skywalker  
> ** i hope he’s not drinking tonight

  
  


On Christmas Eve, the Skywalker brothers go back to their parents house on A Street while Hela goes to the Bahamas to drink tropical cocktails and enjoy the warm climate. Despite being a vegetarian for the past four years, Loki helps his mother prepare the venison for tomorrow, loving her as he loves almost no one else (himself most notably). Tonight, Loki and Thor stay up watching Christmas movies in the den with Mother and Father for hours -  _ It’s a Wonderful Life _ and  _ Home Alone _ and this one flick called  _ The Family Stone _ that makes Loki tear up a little despite himself - and when it hits midnight, the grandfather clock chimes the hour to them in its somber and aged way, bringing the family back to so many midnights in the years before when the children used to stay up until twelve o’clock Christmas morning to open presents.

“Oh my God, it’s midnight,” Thor says, looking at Loki with so much boyish excitement on his beautiful face. “We should open presents.”

“Yes!” Mother cries, standing up from the sofa immediately. “We should open presents!”

Father, with his arm draped across the back of the sofa where Mother was just sitting, gives her a wry and loving look. “You don’t want to exercise some self-discipline this year, my dear?”

“Oh, to hell with self-discipline,” Mother says, already moving towards the Christmas tree decorated with white fairy lights and ornaments about as old if not older than Loki himself. “We will open presents now and we will enjoy it, just like the way we used to.” She looks all around at the family gathered. “Agreed?”

None of the men can argue. Mother passes out presents wrapped in glittering gold and silver paper one by one, and they each take turns opening.

Thor, of course, tears his gifts’ packaging to shreds, paper and cardboard going everywhere, crinkly and glossy bows falling to the floor. The first present of Christmas is from Father, who gives to his son an antique hunting knife embossed with triskelions and vines on a trellis and an actual gun - a nice, shiny, Colt Python from 1965, unloaded but packaged with a carton of bullets. Thor beams bright and loud at this gift, getting up off of the rug to wrap his father in a massive bear hug. Then he opens mother’s present, finding within a Cosby-esque sweater, a vibrant scarlet scarf, and woolen mittens to match. His last gift is a weird one - a blank CD-RW in a transparent green jewel case, wrapped in newspaper, tagged  _ From Loki _ . Thor stares at this present for a moment or so, his expression warped with confusion.

“What is this?” he asks.

“It’s a mixtape,” Loki replies evenly over his hot chocolate. He’d thrown it together on a whim while he was crafting Amora’s playlist, dropping in Fleet Foxes and Tegan and Sara and the alt-folk queen of his music collection: Regina Spektor. He feels a little nervous as he says, “I didn’t want to write down the songs for you because I wanted them to be a surprise, not that I think you’d recognize any of them.”

Thor smiles a little and says, “I don’t know, Loki, I like Coldplay too.” Mother is smiling at them so big it looks as though her head might split in two. Loki is warm, fuzzy, and deeply uncomfortable, so he just turns to Father when he starts opening his presents.

Three ties from Loki, of course, one of them decorated with swordfish. Some books authored by Norwegians from Mother, which makes Father get up off of the sofa and kiss Mother all over her face, ignoring her when she laughs and laughs. Sometimes it awes Loki just how much his parents love each other even as Father is debatably an awful tyrant of a man and a father and a husband in that order. Thor got Father a really nice gold watch with an ivory bezel - a truly beautiful piece of Swedish craftsmanship that Father admires for a long while before patting Thor on the shoulder as if to say, “thank you” or “you did good, son.”

Then it’s Loki’s turn. From Mother, he has gotten the same present as Thor in a more distinctly Loki-esque configuration - his sweater edgier, his Italian cashmere scarf and wool gloves black instead of red. Of course, he thanks Mother for this with a kiss, even wrapping his new scarf around his neck and marveling at the luscious feel of the fabric against his skin. Of course, Father has given him a new journal for the seventh year in a row, and Loki would honestly lose his shit over this if not for the fact that this year, Father has paired the journal with a very beautiful antique pen. He simply says, “Thanks, Dad,” and leaves it at that, feeling that this suffices. Thor’s present comes last - a flat, square package wrapped in purple paper with holly and mistletoe on it. Loki carefully peels the paper back to reveal a vinyl album -  _ Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus _ by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

“I picked it up when we were at the Dimond Center,” Thor comments offhandedly. “It just looked, you know, like you - indie and heady and dramatic. I thought you’d like it.”

It is a surprisingly thoughtful gift, something Loki hadn’t expected from his brother. He does not smile or cry, just says, “Thank you,” and tucks the album beneath his feet where he is sitting on the floor.

Mother comes last. Mother puts on her canary diamond necklace from Thor, her rings and her driving gloves from Father, and she laughs and she cries and she is so happy on this Christmas morning that Loki almost regrets teasing her so long ago, telling her that this Christmas wouldn’t be a good one.  _ She deserves a good one _ , he thinks to himself, watching her scream and flail and dance around the great silver and crystal dragon statue he has gotten for her. 

“Loki!” she cries, wrapping her arms around him and kissing his temple hard. “How did you know I would love it?”

“I know you, Mom,” he says simply, holding her back and rocking a little from side to side with her. She is a witch and she is happy and it is all Loki really wanted for Christmas, really.

Eventually, Mother and Father go to bed, citing their need to get up in six hours and start dinner in earnest. Mother kisses both of her sons goodnight, rubbing her hands over their heads and faces and smiling almost teary-eyed with delight as she passes out of the room. Loki and Thor look at each other once they’re alone, gauging each other’s reaction to their novel state of Yuletide loneliness. Thor nods at the television.

“You want to watch another classic?” The older of the two grabs the remote off of the mahogany coffee table and clicks onto the guide. “It looks like the Charlie Brown Christmas movie is coming on next.”

To tell you the truth, Loki could go to bed. He could reject Thor and traipse up to his childhood bedroom and act like he’s so big and cool and beyond his desire for fraternity and comfort on this perfect holiday morning. He could be such an asshole and grow old and bitter and never change how he feels about his brother, his family, or himself. That would be a valid way to live - he’d have every right after what he’s been through - but that’s not what he wants.

It’s not what he needs either.

Loki snuggles down into his scarf and sweater, crossing his legs Indian-style on the rug. He nods a little and says, “We can watch another.” Thor smiles, and they sit together on the bearskin rug like the two sweaterbound Alaskan babies they used to be years ago. Eventually they fall asleep, and at 3:30 in the morning, Loki blearily opens his eyes to the fairy-lit den and Thor snuggled next to him on the floor, snoring softly. He feels tender.

Tapping Thor on the nose until he grunts awake, Loki murmurs, “It’s half past three. We should go to bed.”

“No, bruh, I’m stayin’ here,” Thor mutters, closing his eyes and tucking his face into the plush rug. 

“And having your back kill you throughout dinner in twelve hours?” Loki asks. He scoffs. “Not me, brother.”

Thor opens his eyes at this, giving Loki a measured and ambiguous look. He sits up, stretches like some great jungle cat, and trails a huge yawn with, “Okay. Let’s go to bed.” 

So Thor follows Loki up the stairs and they retreat to their separate bedrooms, murmuring soft  _ goodnight _ s to each other before closing their doors. Loki slips beneath his quilt and sheets in his sweater, socks, and underwear, and when he dreams, he dreams of a pale sun and his brother beneath it - freckled, blue-eyed, perfect and, most importantly, his.

He wakes seven hours later, mostly rested but still suffering with that customary holiday grogginess that overtakes him every Thanksgiving and Christmas. Loki puts on his brand new sweater and a pair of black skinnies that makes his ass look great and goes downstairs to find Mother puttering around with dinner in the kitchen - searing venison and caramelizing onions and mushrooms, heating carrots and turnips and parsnips on the other available burners, microwaving potatoes to mash them into creamy goodness later, listening to dusty Christmas records on the gramophone in the dining room. Loki sidles up to Mother at the sink and starts to wash his hands without even being asked to, asking, “Do you need help? I can cut vegetables and mix the stuffing.”

“Oh, Loki,” Mother coos, squeezing her age-old kitchen helper on the cheek. “I actually really wanted to get started on the stuffing, so thank you for getting up right when I needed you to!”

Loki nods and wipes his hands dry on a dishtowel. “Of course, Mom,” he says, and by one-thirty in the afternoon, dinner is on the table. Venison steaks with caramelized onions and mushrooms, cooked vegetable medley in a great crystal bowl, cranberry sauce all mixed up instead of in can-shaped form, stuffing and mashed potatoes and potato salad and a dry red wine. This is how the Skywalkers do Christmas dinner, and as they all sit in their predetermined places around the table - with Father and Mother at the ends and Thor and Loki on opposite sides, facing each other - they say, “Merry Christmas,” and a generic Christmas blessing, thanking the Lord for their togetherness and the good food and all the shit Loki truly doesn’t believe in but goes along with for the sake of his mother. He takes a sip from his Cab Sav and relishes the tartness of the wine on his tongue, the way it doesn’t quite hold his hand like a Moscato or a Zinfandel would. 

“Amen,” everyone says, then starts to serve their plates and dig in.

Things are fine. They always start out fine. Loki is content to eat all the non-meat options and watch his brother and his father painstakingly, methodically demolish everything he and Mother have prepared for them, finding solace in the way they go  _ mmm _ and say, “The stuffing is amazing.” Sometimes, his family is completely normal and he finds it hard to believe he ever had any problem with them growing up, ever felt suicidal and black sheepy and wrong in the presence of his white parents and his white siblings. Sometimes, things are okay and he is proved wrong.

Then, all at once, he is right, because it’s the fourth year in a row that Father sits up at the head of the table, looks at Thor, and says, “Well, son, I hope you’re happy with the choice you made.”

“Oh my God, Dad, really?” Thor says immediately around a mouthful of venison, his eyes finding the ceiling. “I don’t want to do it this year, really.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Father says - classic Daddy of the Year, classic emotional abuse. “I just wanted to say that I hope you’re happy with going into astrophysics or meteorology or whatever, and that I hope that one day you’ll come to your senses and join me and your sister at Asgard.”

“Like I want to work with Hela breathing down my neck everyday,” Thor mutters (and Loki really has to concede that he has a great point there), then suddenly throws his fork down onto his plate and says in a louder, more assertive voice, “‘ _ Come to my senses _ ’? You say that like I plan to go into heroin addiction and the mafia after I graduate, or worse yet, Loki’s field, if you can even call it a field. It’s a yard, really.”

“Holy shit, why am I getting dragged into this?” Loki asks, jumping from zero to sixty in an instant. For some reason, he thinks of Dr. Gast, and this makes him even more pissed than he already was. “A ‘ _ yard _ ’? A ‘ _ yard _ ’? That’s the best you could come up with, Thor?”

“I meant what I said,” Thor retorts with a cold look in Loki’s direction.

“Wait, wait, wait, wait,” Father cuts in, pointing at Thor with his index and pointer finger, his face a marble stone with anger carved into it. “Don’t you ever talk to me like that. I’ve had it with your foolishness.”

“ _ My _ foolishness?!” Thor is bellowing, looking ready to flip the dinner table over or start punching holes in the walls (and yeah, that’s happened before - it happened about five Christmases ago, in fact, and that would have been YouTube video-worthy if not for the fact that it was so damn terrifying when it happened). “I’m not a fucking failure, Dad! And I’ve had e-fucking-nough of being treated like a fucking idiot because I’m! Not! You!”

“You will lower your voice right now or so help me God I will put you out of this house on Christmas Day!” Father hollers back, trying to win through sheer volume, drama, and force of will as he always has. 

“Why are you screaming at us?” Loki asks under his breath. He looks at Mother for the first time since this whole hurrah began and finds her with her hands steepled in front of her face, crying. Abruptly, a fish hook is piercing his heart and yanking it sharply down into his colon, and hot tears are springing to his face. His mother can’t cry. She is the strongest person he knows, and she cannot cry like this.

Father is sitting back. Thor is fuming, his food abandoned, his knife clutched in his hand like a weapon he intends to use on someone. Loki wonders why in the world he thought everything was going to turn out okay this year, why he had deluded himself into believing such an impossibility just because last night transpired a certain way. He sits with stuffing partially-chewed in his mouth, unable to swallow or stomach the food, everything soured in his gut.

Then, Father starts with the ranting.

“It’s just sad to me to see two such bright young men throw their futures away,” he announces over the rim of his wine glass, shaking his head at both Thor and Loki. “You two have everything ahead of you. A whole world of knowledge in your heads and at your fingertips. All your lives you have been given everything you could have ever wanted or needed to become the best people in the world - better than me, better than your mother, better than that psychotic wreck that is your sister. You’ve been given the cream of the crop of education, healthcare, extracurricular activities, and spiritual nourishment, and yet you piddle and waste it away in your feeble, commonplace desires to go get drunk in a desert or bury your nose in a book for the rest of your lives. Do you know how that makes me feel? Do you know how that makes your mother and I look to the outside, to our friends, to our colleagues, to our coworkers? I have to tell my colleagues and my subordinates that my son wants to be a weatherman and look at a doppler radar for the rest of his life, and that is the most disgusting thing I can think of.” He scoffs, taking a sip of Cab Sav. “ If you worked half as hard as your mother and I you’d both be president.” To Thor - “You especially.”

“Christ Almighty,” Thor mutters, his eyes on the ceiling again, his face red. 

“And yet you throw it all away,” Father says with a sigh, slamming his glass of wine down on the table with nearly enough force to shatter the stem. “You dishonor me.”

“There is  _ nothing _ wrong with me, Dad,” Thor says, looking at his father with blue eyes that have grown slightly watery in the interim. “I’m me! I’ve always done my best and I haven’t made any mistakes as far as I know.”

Loki can’t help it. He snorts and says, “Yeah, right,” and suddenly, everyone’s eyes are on him, accusatory and angry and just plain heartbroken.

“What are you talking about, Loki?” Thor asks, more enraged than he was moments earlier. “You’re just a fucking pothead with your dumb bitchy friends and your screwed up sex life and-”

“ _ My _ screwed up sex life?!” Loki cries, his eyes saucers. “Are you fucking kidding me?!”

“You’re the fuck-up in the family and everyone knows it!” Thor exclaims, doing exactly what Father was doing earlier and pointing Loki down with his index and middle fingers. “At least Hela has a fucking successful career and her own thing going on, but you’re just going to waste your life away getting high and fucking around with billionaires that say your name the way you like them to say it!”

“ _ You’re an alcoholic! _ ” Loki can finally say it - finally, freedom, release, ecstasy - he can say what he’s been wanting to say for years in the presence of everyone who needs to hear it. “You’re bipolar and you’re a fucking alcoholic, and yet  _ I’m _ the one who’s so wrong-!”

“Oh, Loki, just shut the fuck up and come off it!” Thor hollers in a voice that has gone animalistic and terrifying with rage, striking fear in Loki’s cold dead heart. “We’ve had enough of your pity party for one lifetime!”

That’s all Loki needs to hear. Without thinking, he stands from the table, knocking his glass of wine over and spilling deep red across the white tablecloth. He doesn’t care. He’s weeping, running away from the table and his family and everything that has ever happened to him. The last thing he hears before he’s left the house entirely in his parka and his gloves and scarf is his Mother’s banshee wail, pleading, “I don’t know why you have to be so adversarial! I don’t understand this meanness!”

And you know what? Loki doesn’t understand it either. It simply has always been.

He drives through the neighborhood of his life’s first chapters, sliding amongst the near-identical houses housing rich Christmas families that the Skywalkers have, of course, had their acquaintanceships and friendships with in the past. The Kristiansens and the Aabergs and the Bengtssons, with their ranches in Montana and RVs for vacation time on the tundra and their 401Ks and the fact that they, like Loki, will never have to worry for themselves or their children financially, barring some major economic upheaval within the next twenty-to-fifty years. Thinking along these lines brings Loki away from his family in small snatches, the crater that his parents’ house has become, steaming and smoldering in the wake of the meteorite that has hit it. How is it possible to implode on time every year, with circadian regularity, almost Swiss in this way? How is it possible that Loki could have simultaneously expected this turn of events and yet come out surprised that things turned out so bad? 

“Miracles happen every day,” he murmurs into his steering wheel at a stop sign,  _ thunk _ ing his head down against the wheel with a groan of pain. 

Loki parks by the marina to watch the still frozen water and the boats with their inert sails triangling high into the frigid air. He warms himself by his car heater, listening to no music, no radio news, no podcasts - simply the sound of his own air coming and going. He cries hard, screaming and beating his steering wheel to death until the residents of the neighborhood by the marina have probably had more than their fill of his car horn symphony. Finally, when it dawns on him that he’s really being an asshole, he turns back around and goes home to A Street, dreading the confrontation with any and all of his family members that is inevitable to occur.

When he drives up, Thor is sitting on the front step in his creamy white sweater, his jeans, and no overcoat, hat, or gloves. He is drinking amber liquid from a highball glass, and it is so cold outdoors that when Loki steps outside of the climate-controlled comfort of his car, he feels as though he has been smashed in the face with a skillet. Loki walks the yard and a half up the driveway and gives Thor a look of profound disappointment. “You’re going to freeze, you imbecile,” he spits.

Thor makes a grunting noise and takes a long sip from his highball. “Thank God, right?”

Loki is just mad enough to stop making for the steps and look at his brother a second time, to ask, “What?”

“You’d feel better,” comes Thor’s matter-of-fact answer.

Loki’s eyes burn in the blue light of the mid-afternoon. Thor is a rock of a person, an alcoholic Rodin, and Loki means it with every fiber of his being when he pronounces, “You know nothing about me.”

“Who’s fault is that?” Thor retorts seemingly without even thinking about it, closing his eyes against the cold and the question and the inevitable onslaught of Loki’s anger, which, here it comes -

“I don’t fucking know, Thor, who’s fault  _ is  _ it? Who became an utter jackass as soon as they hit high school-”

“You did,” Thor answers, unflinching when Loki doesn’t stop.

“And stopped talking about anything of substance-”

“You did.”

“And drove home in the middle of winter, drunk off their ass, and nearly killed both of us before we even turned became fully-fledged people, thus ruining everything for everyone who ever mattered to either of us?!”

Thor goes silent, shocked by this progression of the conversation. He looks at Loki’s panting, frenzied form standing about two feet away from him, and the realization that they’ve never had this conversation is plain on his ruddy, flushed face. “You’re still mad about that?” he asks.

Loki could scream. Loki does scream. 

“Yes!” he yells, hysterical, his hands flying through the air. “Yes, I’m mad about that! I almost  _ died _ , and yet everyone loves you, they always fucking love you, even when they’re criticizing you at the dinner table because they love you so bad they just want you with them all the time, at work, in life, everywhere! Meanwhile I’m just the crazy, emotionally unstable BPD asshole who everyone is scared of!”

Thor’s brow furrows in patent confusion. “I thought you were okay with that.”

“Of course I’m not okay with that!” Loki bellows, this close to ripping every strand of hair out of his head. “How do you think it makes me feel that people judge me before they even know me, that they  _ hate _ me before they even know me, because, what, I cry in public and spit in Steve Rogers’ face at a party once and I can’t stand waiting in line at Starbucks behind white girls who don’t know how to pronounce  _ quinoa?! _ ”

“Maybe if you weren’t such a dick all the time,” Thor starts to say, but no - Loki isn’t quite finished.

“Do you know what it’s like to be me?!” he screeches into the air between him and Thor, only managing not to reach out and grab Thor by the collar by fisting the sides of his own parka in his hands. “I hate  _ everything _ , so fucking much, and it never stops! It’s never over! If I’m not feeling everything all at once, I feel  _ nothing _ , and I’m sick of it! Do you know what that feels like?!”

Thor looks at Loki very honestly, his face, his blue eyes full of so much pain. “Yes,” he says, and this is not what Loki expected to hear. 

Thinking of this and nothing else, Loki turns away and goes inside the house, up the stairs and into his bedroom. He tears his parka and his boots from his body and cries himself hoarse into the plush spread of his mattress and sheets, cries for himself, cries for Thor.

Of course, we know by now that they used to be bosom buddies. Merriam-Webster would call every year to schedule an appointment with a photographer -  _ brother  _ was the word and Thor and Loki were the picture, them in matching striped T-shirts with their arms around each other, comfortable more with each other’s bodies than they ever were with their own. Of course, the dictionary thing is an exaggeration - all this is just to say that they were the special kind of siblings whose souls had been twinned though they’d come from such disparate sources. As a thirteen year-old, Loki could never have imagined his life without Thor, could never have imagined a day when he might throw the word  _ hate _ around in the vicinity of his brother’s sacred, special name, the name he said more times a day than he said his own. 

But then there was high school. Environmental triggers like extra homework, high school football culture, the mountaintop zeniths of pubescent attraction to the opposite sex, and their father’s consistent emotional abuse crystalized around Thor like a great golden garbage chrysalis and he emerged an angry butterfly with a manic streak that had him motormouthing and bullying his way through every interaction with Loki, who, mind, was a genderqueer thirteen year-old daydreamer who read Austen and watched  _ Shakespeare in Love  _ like it was the greatest film ever made. Loki was trading in his colorful middle school closet for all black, all leather, and some feminine silhouettes, wasting away in the backs of classrooms to doze after having spent the previous night paralyzed with existential angst, smoking weed in the girl’s bathroom with this one redheaded girl that pitied him, painting his nails and fighting the urge to end it all. They couldn’t have been more similar or more different from one another. Of course they warred. Like tectonic plates, soured by jealousy, monstrous with rage, they ground their teenage bodies together.

After Loki’s suicide attempt, things took an interesting turn. Thor has never been a cold person is the thing, and Loki must concede that their mother has always known what she’s talking about when she’s said that Thor loves him. In the months following Alaska Psych, the months filled with psychotropic pills and sessions with a cognitive behavioral therapist, Thor sometimes lingered outside of Loki’s bedroom doorway and asked him if he wanted to go to the movies or take a trip down to the McDonalds, where Thor promised he wouldn’t buy Loki anything containing meat. Sometimes Loki would rebuff him with a quickness, stringing together the ugliest and most evocative words he could in some expression of “fuck off,” and oh would they clash then, cursing each other out and openly asking God why they’d been cursed with such an awful sibling. Other times, Loki would simply feign sleep and feel his brother’s presence in the doorway, feel Thor’s eyes on the back of his head, him watching his younger sibling for long moments that tested the reality of Loki’s mock-or-actual sleep before disappearing off into the rest of the house to do his own thing. Other times, Loki would look at Thor as if he was being asked to devour something inedible and ask, “What’s the catch?”

“No catch,” Thor replied, tossing his wallet back and forth in his hands. “Get in my car, loser.”

So Loki did. He did like being Thor’s passenger in those days.

They could have been saved from the maw of total relationship destruction. The monster had been chewing on them without swallowing for years, and they’d come out of the mouth wounded yet alive only to jump right back in with another argument, criticism, prank, or simple difference of opinion. Thor called Loki a  _ faggot _ and intentionally broke his iPod. Loki slammed the door in Thor’s face and refused to go to the homecoming game. Month after month populated by this oscillation between brotherhood to utter hatedom, until Loki’s junior year in high school saw him getting in Thor’s car one night after  _ Macbeth _ rehearsals afterschool, putting his backpack down on the ground between his legs, smelling alcohol in the air.

“What is that?” Loki asks, still trying to clean the smear of stage makeup from his cheeks and brow with a baby wipe. 

Thor looked casual, happy, as he pulled out of his designated senior’s parking spot. Fat flurries fell through the sky, coating the world in frost and plush white. “What’s what, dude?” Thor asked, then brazenly took a swig from the can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in the cupholder. Loki’s eyes blew out wide like dinner plates.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Loki asked as Thor’s Adam’s apple bobbed with his deep swallow. “It’s about to start storming, nimrod, what the hell do you think you’re doing?!”

“It’s just my third beer, Loki, come on,” Thor attempted to justify, which of course only made things worse.

“ _ Third?! _ You’re playing God, you absolute fucking psychopath!” Loki grabbed his backpack and unlocked the passenger side door despite the fact that they were flying down a thirty-five mile road at fifty-two miles per hour. Hand on the door handle, he spit at Thor, “Pull over, I’m getting out.”

“The hell you are!” Thor roared, reaching across Loki and locking his door again. The car skidded sideways a bit with the motion, and Loki felt every inch of his skin electrified with fear.

“Thor,  _ stop it! _ Can you just drive like a normal fucking person?!” Loki, for some reason, was crying, because in those days the rivers ran freely from his eyes, the dams as of yet unbuilt. He grabbed Thor’s PBR from the cupholder, opened the window, and began to pour the beer down into the slush and ice of the street and curb outside, and this, of course, was his first and final mistake. This is what turned a minor disaster into a catastrophe.

“ _ Loki! _ ” Thor bellowed like an animal, taking both hands from the wheel to wrestle his brother for supremacy of the situation second, the beer can first. The steering wheel whirled wildly but miraculously did not take them too far out of their lane, but Thor’s iron foot on the gas sent them hurtling directly into the intersection of Northern Lights Blvd and Lake Otis Pkwy, colliding directly with a Subaru and, thankfully, a flashy Mustang which contained no fragile children, their lives not begging to be taken by Thor’s massive Toyota pickup. In the ICU, doctors and nurses tended to Thor and Loki’s concussed heads; their fractured ribs and pelvises and the canyons down their femurs; Thor’s dislocated shoulder; Loki’s punctured lung, which he tried in vain to wail about in the night. Loki remembers none of it - none of it at all - just recalls coming home in a wheelchair, sitting across the dinner table from Thor, and registering the man as a total blank, a nonperson - no longer the one who would ruin or save his life, no longer the brother whose last name he shared. Thor simply no longer was, and for the rest of junior year, this is how things remained.

Marvel University was, in the eyes of Frigga Skywalker and (secretly) her eldest son, the promise of a reconciliation between brothers. When Loki started going to Marvel, gracing its golden halls with his shadowy, pitch black form, it became Thor’s responsibility, in a way, to show him the ropes. He didn’t do that great of a job. He noticed how little Loki ate - meals of Starbucks coffee and Danishes lasting him through days of grueling coursework, refusals of fraternal offers to eat on Thor’s meal plan in the dining hall with his friends and fellow footballers. It killed Thor to see Loki experience constant rejection in the face of every prospective friendship or relationship he might have gone through outside of Amora and Namor, and yes, sometimes Thor got the shoe or the phone or the textbook or the door in the face in the wake of all this rejection, and yes, Thor would yell at his brother and shake him by the shoulders and tell him to “ _ get over [himself]! _ ” then too. In the drunken hours between lovemaking with some beautiful woman and scoring touchdowns on a verdant field, though, Thor found his brother’s face somewhere, anywhere - in the bleachers, on the quad, across their parents’ varnished dinner table - and he wondered desperately when they became so unhappy with each other. When did Loki’s heart go missing? Would it ever make a reappearance?

Questions that have had no answers until this Christmas Day.

Two hours later, it is still Christmas. The sky has taken on a deeper blue tone and the snow is falling in earnest. Loki, having prepared adequately for this stay at his home away from home, has rolled a joint with the bit of Chemdawg he packed in with his little rucksack of clothes and toiletries and is smoking it out of the crack in his bedroom window, sitting at the window seat and cuddling up in his sweater and an afghan. Rays of euphoria and relaxation sing through him, his head full of hot air and the back of his throat stinging with the citrusy and peppery notes of the herb. He is on one of his last drags when there comes a soft knock on the door; thinking that it’s Mother, he easily calls back, “Come in.”

He doesn’t quite know what to do when Thor is the one opening the door.

Thor stands in the doorway for long moments, saying nothing, the shy little boy he never was - not even in the wake of Loki’s not-death. Loki finds this interesting at first - preferable, even - but when he begins to tire of the exercise, he says, “If you’re just going to stand there-”

“You don’t hate everything.” Thor says it as if he has been waiting to say it a long time. This is not how he speaks very often, so Loki is understandably taken aback.

“Excuse me?”

“You like theatre.” Finally, Thor’s eyes find Loki’s. “Well, you used to. I don’t know if you still do. But you liked theatre a lot, and you like to read books like  _ The Corrections _ and like, the Bible, but not because you’re a Christian.”

This brings the gentlest of smiles to Loki’s face. “Old Testament God is my spirit animal,” he says, mostly because he as a dirty old Eskimo is able to get away with referencing a spirit animal without it being cultural appropriation.

“You like sushi,” Thor says. “You like red wine, which is dumb as hell because white wine is where it’s at. You like Mom. You like Amora and Namor for God knows what reason.” Thor makes a face of patent confusion and disgust. “Well, Namor is pretty cool, but that woman-”

“Watch it,” Loki warns without missing a beat.

“Sorry,” Thor breathes, and then, because the air is warm between them, smiles. “You don’t hate everything is the point I was trying to make. I just wanted you to know that.”

Loki looks away, back to his joint on its very last embers. Something stills and silences inside him for the first time in what feels like an eternity. “Duly noted.”

On Friday, December 29, the heat goes off at the Skywalker brothers’ apartment, and Loki and Thor are forced to tramp around the house in several layers of heavy sweaters, scarves, socks, and flannel sweatpants while they wait for the landlord to send someone over to fix things during the inconvenient holiday weekend. Both brothers refuse to go to their parents’ house out of a sense of signature Skywalker pride, stubbornness, and simple lack of desire to spend time with the man they so recently lost a war to. The sun doesn’t rise until 10:15 in the mid-winter morning, and Loki finds himself outside as it painstakingly climbs the tall ladder of the Alaska sky, him sitting beneath the heat lamp on the patio and smoking a cigarette there both to avoid nicotine-staining the inside of the house and because it truthfully is warmer beneath the propane lamp than it is indoors. Thor finds him there with his mouth around a Marlboro menthol and scoffs.

“Why are you smoking a cigarette?” he asks, moving closer to the heat lamp and practically moaning as the warmth radiates over him in waves. 

Loki folds his parka closer and tighter around himself. “Because I hate my life and I want to die,” he says.

Thor looks at him for a long time. He seems to be begging for forgiveness all the time these days. Squinting into the shining sun’s corona, he murmurs, “I think I know what you mean,” and they sit in their little pocket of heat for minutes that stretch into the twenties, until the cold has bitten their noses too red and it’s time to go back inside.


	6. JANUARY

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy new year! may you be vaccinated, comfortable, and well-read!

#  _ JANUARY _

The year is new. Loki doesn’t believe in resolutions, having broken far too many in his relatively short life; he settles with calling Namor at the stroke of one o’clock, being that Namor is only one hour behind him while Amora is more than nine hours ahead. School has about a week to begin anew, and in the interim, Loki familiarizes himself with a house newly still and temperate, unfrequented by Thor’s friends or anyone but the three of them - Loki, Thor, and the puppy. Loki walks Fenris through the snow and the bitter cold and is rejuvenated by it, by some unspoken something that the frenzy of the holidays left behind. 

On the second day of the year, Thor and Sif have a knockdown, dragout fight that Loki listens to through the wall. It’s tragic, from what Loki can tell - flying four hours up from Portland to surprise Thor with a love confession and a plea for their renewed twoship in what might be the most uncharacteristically vulnerable acts she has ever committed in living memory, Sif shows up in red, with flowers, asking Thor to love her. Loki kind of wants to cry as he listens to the whole exchange devolve into yelling and accusation, a double-sided rewriting of history: Sif alleging that Thor has never cared for her, Thor upbraiding Sif for never respecting his boundaries - and there is a moment where he almost thinks he should step in when Thor punches a wall (whoops, there goes one-hundred bucks for the repairman), but he is a coward and he ultimately remains hidden beneath the covers, sometimes a child in emotional maturity. Sif leaves, and Loki knows that things are going to be different for the next month or so without football, her, and possibly the rest of Thor’s non-Avenger friends. He knows he is unprepared for it all, but he’ll face it with his straight and hard face, the one he’s been wearing since it became absolutely necessary for him to get through each day.

Monday, January 8th. First thing in the morning, Loki walks into his Introduction to Linear Algebra class with a sinking sense of dread in his gut, math having never been his thing. White-knuckling through fifty minutes of inane lecture and note-taking on what books he needs to get, what superpowered calculator he needs to purchase with fifty dollars of his scholarship and/or grant money, and so on and so forth, he wonders how he’s going to make it through the class with a grade higher than a C-minus. C-minus will certainly get him to graduation, mind, but his self-esteem, mental health, and worth in the eyes of at least one of his parents is going to suffer for the time being.

No matter at this moment. He is walking across the quad to the library for work, and who does he see approaching in the distance but his two lifelines at this godforsaken private liberal arts institution - Amora and Namor, arm in arm in their wintriest overcoats and scarves. “ _ Aaaagh! _ ” Amora cries as soon as she lays eyes on him, and then he is making the same noise back, and then they are dashing through the snow in each other’s direction, colliding and hugging and slipping on the frosty ground. It is like feeling the sun for the first time in months to be with them again.

“Oh my God, did you go tanning?!” Loki is saying, laughing as he puts his arms around Namor and squeezes him as tightly as possible. Amora is on top of both of them, the ground a solid glacial rock beneath them, the cold seeping into their clothes.

“Of course I did,” Namor remarks with a rare, winning smile. “You know I had to style on these hos.”

They are a laughing, twelve-limbed mess in the middle of everything. Though she and Loki have work in T-minus seven minutes, Amora drags her BFFLs off to the horror that is the Starbucks line so that they can compare schedules, order hot coffee and glazed cake donuts, and catch up on what happened over break. Loki doesn’t feel like telling the story of the Christmas from Hell for the second time (he’d already told Namor last week), so he lets Amora take center stage for the time being, him genuinely interested in her tale of witchy/bitchy siblings from Stockholm, Yuletide ceremonies over fire, a winter fling named Baldr, a tarot spread for the new year. He loves having her back in his corner of the world, free for him to look at and speak to at length.

After work, Loki has two more classes and then the rest of the day off. This is his favorite part about his new schedule - the fact that his long days are Tuesday and Thursday to the exclusion of all else. Hindu Theology with Dr. Endwi Gast should be a breeze this semester, Loki can see it as soon as he walks into the classroom and Gast gives him his really freaky smile with all his teeth and his lidded honey eyes and says, “It’s good to see you again so soon, Loki.” Gagging from the flirty vibes aside, Loki feels pretty great about this class, and he’s in high spirits as he passes on to Women, Religion, and Culture across the hall - him the first person in the classroom due to his coincidental proximity. 

He pulls out his laptop and people-watches. Dr. Wendy Lawson is the professor of this class and the second person in the room, buttoned down in a military-style bomber jacket and a Glenn Close haircut. Marvelites from every conceivable major arrive one by one: Okoye Naisiae and W’Kabi Kaluuya, two Kenyan exchange students in vibrant red and blue clothes with geometric print, sit in the front, talking at a moderate volume; Darcy Lewis, a political science major who hangs around Jane Foster, chewing gum and plopping down with all of her bags in a chair in the middle of the room; Bruce Banner, linebacker on the Avengers and fellow ambiguously mentally ill person at Marvel U, who sort of sits close to where Loki is in the back; Wanda and Pietro Maximoff, speaking vernacular Slovak to each other under their breath, sit off to the left.

The third Avenger Loki expects to walk into the room, if anyone at all, would be Carol Danvers. Maybe Natasha Romanoff, which would be such a wonder and a (not) joy to behold. He is floored when instead of one of the other two lady Avengers, Thor walks into the room in Mother’s Christmas sweater, his face red from the cold. Thor easily finds his eyes, and they stare each other down for a moment that verges hard on awkward and Wild West-y. Loki doesn’t know if he should say something.

“Hey, Thor,” Bruce says, giving his fellow linebacker a warm smile. Thor smiles back, and then the moment is over.

“What’s up, bro?” Thor is saying to Bruce as he sits next to him in a chair about two seats away from Loki. Immediately, they are engrossed in a conversation much like the one Loki had with his own friends earlier, and it occurs all at once to Loki that he and Thor are not and will not be friends - not if they share a house, and certainly not if they share a class.

This is the sentiment he carries with him all day, all while he buys his textbooks at the campus bookstore and makes egg drop ramen for dinner at home. Sitting alone in the living room, he munches on his cheapo meal and thinks around and about this feeling of stoniness within him, a gem crystallizing in his middle. Then Thor comes home from wherever, looks at him where he sits and dines on the sofa, and suddenly everything Loki was thinking about being a hard ass motherfucker starts to crumble away, all while Thor watches him eat.

“Hey,” Thor says, awkward and probing.

Loki slurps noodles into his mouth and says, “Hi.” It is as if they’re meeting each other for the first time.

Pulling his mittens off, Thor comes to recline in the polyester armchair across from the sofa on which Loki currently sits. It is warm in the house, a temperate seventy-four degrees as compared to the seventeen degrees of the frigid Alaska outside. Thor is still and shivering for a moment, him absorbing the heat of the indoors with his eyes closed and his body progressively going limp in the chair. Then he opens his eyes and looks at Loki again, with a strange purposefulness behind his irises that Loki really doesn’t want to contemplate. They’ve been doing the whole disengage thing for years, see.

“How about that class?” Thor asks.

Loki knows what Thor is talking about without him even having to clarify. “I like it,” he says, unafraid of disagreeing with Thor (which, to be fair, is a feat that took him years and a borderline fatal car accident to achieve). “The professor is badass.”

Thor smiles at this. “Yeah, she is pretty cool. I just don’t know if I can, you know. Get this class.”

Finishing off his ramen, Loki furrows his brow a bit at his brother. “What do you mean?” he asks. 

Thor abruptly looks nervous, as if he’s realized what he’s saying. He’s never quite been comfortable with showing weakness; despite this, he says, “Humanities classes and religion stuff like that has never been my thing. I’m, you know, a STEM guy.”

“Oh yes, we know,” Loki pronounces in what might count as a glorified yawn, his eyes going momentarily, ironically wide. “I’m in an Intro to Linear Algebra class full of STEM freshmen and I think I’m going to gut myself by the end of the semester.”

“Pfft,” Thor says, shaking his head. “That’s easy.”

“To you,” Loki retorts with only a little heat.

“Well, yeah.” Thor shrugs.

They are silent for a moment, just watching each other. This is the most they’ve talked since Christmas, and Loki feels the novelty of this as he feels the heat in the room. He thinks he wants to end the conversation, unsure of how to go forward, when suddenly Thor lurches forward in his seat and says, “I have an idea.”

Detouring for cheeky, Loki quips, “This oughta be good.”

“What if you help me with this humanities class and in return I help you with your algebra?” Thor holds up two fingers. “Twice a week, Sundays and Wednesdays.”

“Hold on, hold on, hold on.” Loki’s expression sharpens. “I want Wednesdays to chill. My schedule is so dope this semester and I don’t want to fuck with my perfect Wednesdays by having to help your dumb ass get through an elective class you don’t even care about in your last semester before you graduate.”

“Who says I don’t care about it?” Thor asks, looking annoyed but also amused. “Or that I’m dumb?”

Loki raises his arms in a momentary shrug. They stare each other down, cowboys across the dusty expanse of the living room. “Sundays and Thursdays,” Loki offers. “Seven o’clock to nine, and we eat dinner, and no friends or family.” He holds a hand out to shake.

Thor contemplates this for approximately ten seconds, then stands, moves across the room, and shakes Loki’s hand. “Deal,” he says, and then he is off to his bedroom in all his winter clothes, to disrobe and text his girlfriend or do whatever it is Thor does when he is alone.

Thor spends a lot of time alone in January, a lot of time in his bedroom or the living room doing whateverthefuck on his phone or drinking or sleeping. Loki knows without having to ask that this strange loneliness of Thor is due to whatever happened between him and Sif as well as the fact Thor is not dating Valkyrie, who is just as wild and self-destructive as he is, but is instead apparently in a relationship with Jane Foster - a mild-mannered astrophysics major who is just about as customary and sweet as the hazelnut creme coffee Loki makes every morning. Of course there are no wild parties or insane drinking binges in their apartment during January, none of the cacophony that was a constant last semester when Sif and Valkyrie were the ladies in Thor’s life. Loki doesn’t know how to feel about all this, whether he’s sorry for Sif and Valkyrie or relieved on his own behalf to have some peace and quiet. 

Midway through the second week of January, Mother calls Loki. They hadn’t talked that much in the wake of Christmas, when Mother thumbed away her tears and apologized to Loki for how dinner had turned out and Loki simply shook his head and argued that it wasn’t her fault, and that was that. Now, after the war has ended and there’s been no clear winner, Loki and his mother are trying to make things seem normal again, even as it’s been so obvious that there’s been a permanent shift in everyone’s relationships.

“Hello?” Loki says into his phone on his chill Wednesday, him lying back on his favorite sofa in his favorite sweater with his favorite movie on the television and a bowl full of Animal Face, already halfway-smoked.

“Loki,” comes Mother’s soft, gentle voice, so full of love for her adopted son. “What are you up to?”

Loki glances back at the movie on the tube, at his pipe on the coffee table. “Watching a French film and smoking. What about you?”

Instead of answering, Mother asks, “French film? I didn’t know you were into that. Is it New Wave?”

“No, but it’s delightfully inscrutable,” Loki replies, watching long-haired beauties mingle with scruffy Frenchmen on a screen predominated by blue. “I don’t even remember what it’s about, I just know it’s my favorite thing I’ve ever seen so I watch it when I need comforting.”

“Ahh, so you need comforting now,” Mother observes smartly, and Loki doesn’t quite have the strength to argue with her. He sighs.

“Kind of.”

“What’s going on?”

Loki truthfully doesn’t want to talk about it, nor does he quite have the language with which to articulate how strangely unsettled he is. He flounders wordlessly for a moment, then says, “It’s just the new semester. Getting used to all my classes and work and everything.”

The lying comes easy. That’s what makes it so hard. 

“Oh, I know how it is for you,” Mother soothes, suspecting nothing. “You’re a delicate soul, my love. You remind me of myself.”

Loki takes a hit off of his pipe and makes a noise of acknowledgement in the back of his throat. It’s easy to talk to Mother even when he’s avoiding everything of substance, even when she sometimes knows nothing about him.

“I’ve called with an ulterior motive,” Mother eventually says, sounding defeated. “You probably knew that as soon as you picked up the phone.”

Truthfully, Loki knows and has never known anything. “As long as it doesn’t have anything to do with Thor, I’m fine with it,” he says, staring into the television and seeing nothing.

Mother laughs, a high keening noise. “Thor is precisely who it has to do with, I’m afraid.”

Loki groans through the white noise haze of his anxiety. “Make it fast, I don’t want to kill my buzz.”

Mother sounds sad and put out when she sighs, when she says, “Your brother doesn’t have a job. He got fired last semester, remember? And after what happened this Christmas, your father isn’t exactly feeling charitable enough to help Thor out more than he’s already helping him.”

“What does this have to do with me?” comes Loki’s reluctant question. He knows how mean he sounds and he doesn’t like sounding mean where his mother can hear him - especially right now when her heart is still broken and bleeding from the tragedy of the holiday. 

“I was hoping you would help him,” Mother admits in a quiet, uncharacteristically meek voice. “You know how proud he is - he wouldn’t dare ask you to save his life if he needed it.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Loki asks, trying not to sound whiny. “It’s not as though he’s had any job except this one, and I can’t invent skills he doesn’t have.”

“You can help him put together a resume,” Mother notes somewhat hopefully. “Say it was my idea.”

“It is your idea,” Loki points out with a sigh.

“Exactly. So it should be easy to get your brother on board.” Mother sounds desperate in her own special way - put together as she always is, but with an edge of hopelessness to her that makes Loki want to give in and weep. He hates this - the fog of fear, obligation, and guilt that seems to plague him as a member of this family - but he has no way to resist his mother at his tender age and his constant feeling of indebtedness where she’s concerned. He exhales deeply.

“Whatever, Mom. I’ll talk to him tonight and figure out how to get Thor employed, even though it’s none of my business and I’d rather not touch any of this.”

“Thank you, Loki,” Mother breathes. Abruptly, her voice is flooded with relief and happiness the likes of which Loki could never bring out in her while doing something purely on his own or for himself - only with Thor’s help could he ever please his mother so.

Tonight, he corners Thor while he’s playing  _ Call of Duty _ with a notepad and a ballpoint pen. Pulling Thor’s headset halfway off of his head, Loki announces to him and the room in general, “Mom wants me to help you put together a resume. She wants you to get a job and she loves you very much.”

Obviously put off by the notion that he needs a hand with anything, Thor scowls at Loki and turns back to his game, shooting some simulated gunman down with a short burst of make-believe gunfire. “I don’t need a job or your help. I’m fine just as I am.”

“Take it up with your mother,” Loki shoots back, sitting on the edge of the coffee table halfway in Thor’s line of sight so he can’t ignore him. He tucks a piece of hair behind his ear. “How long did you work at the math lab before you got fired?”

“I didn’t technically get fired,” Thor argues with his eyes still firmly on the television screen. His fingers fly with ease over his controller as he hunts down virtual others. “I was just let go for unprofessional conduct.”

“Ergo  _ fired _ ,” Loki retorts. He puts the tip of his pen to the blank sheet of note paper in a way some might call testy. “How long did you work at the math lab? You’d do better just cooperating with me and getting this whole thing over with.” 

Thor curses as his avatar is summarily sniped; he puts his controller down, quietly fuming. “Three and a half years. 2014 to 2017 - you need months and everything?”

Loki marks down the dates, guesstimating the months based on Thor’s history at Marvel. “I can do the work,” he remarks under his breath, then - once he’s gotten everything down - “What are your skills?”

“Skills?” Thor asks, scoffing in disbelief. “I can do advanced calculus and lift more than sixty pounds. What the hell else would I be expected to do for a job?”

“I don’t know, Thor, can you type?” Loki asks, jotting down  _ advanced math skills _ and  _ can lift 60+ pounds _ . “Can you cook? Are you good at customer service? What programs can you use on a computer?”

Thor gives Loki a look of profound exhaustion. “I’ve only had one job, Loki,” he points out as if his brother is missing the obvious, and it is the first time in a long time Loki has heard Thor sound defeated - the first time since Christmas, in fact. Loki frowns.

“That’s the point of all this,” he says, fixing Thor with his dark eyes. “So you end up with more than one job eventually. Now - how fast can you type?”

Eventually, they have assembled a one-page resume detailing Thor’s meager work history and a list of his skills - some of which he has yet to reveal (customer service, for example). Loki types the resume up and prints fifteen copies at work, then comes back home and instructs Thor to hand them out to prospective employers all around town, remarking under his breath, “Hopefully you’ll get at least ten dollars an hour with this.”

Thor pauses, holding his brand spanking new resumes in both hands with an awed look on his face. “Thank you, Loki,” he says, and Loki truthfully can’t recall the last time he heard those words come out of his brother’s mouth. He simply nods in reply, choosing not to be too much of a girl about it, and within a week, Thor has gotten a job at a pink Americana diner called  _ Lightning in a Bottle _ , Fandral and Volstagg are coming over to drink Miller Lite in congratulations, and Loki is patting himself on the back for a job well done, satisfied that he, for once, is the good son.

On the second Friday in January, Loki makes honey mustard salmon in foil for dinner. He minces garlic and squeezes the juice out of two big bright lemons; whisks honey, Dijon mustard, butter, garlic, and lemon juice into a thick homogenous mixture to pour over the fish. Thor sort of hovers in the kitchen while he works, alternating his attention between Loki’s cooking and his own phone; he doesn’t ask any questions, but Loki can feel him brimming with curiosity as Loki puts food on plates.

“Why does that look so good?” Thor asks him, sniffing the tasty aromas wafting off of dinner. Loki didn’t quite intend to make enough for Thor, but he serves a plate for his brother regardless, figuring he doesn’t need leftovers.

“Because I made it,” he replies without missing a beat, putting Thor’s plate down on the kitchen table. He motions towards the utensil drawer - “You want to do me a favor and grab some forks?”

Thor makes a face at Loki but does as he’s told regardless. Placing the utensils on the table, he gives Loki a guarded look, tucking his phone in the pocket of his sweatpants. “Is this for me too?” he asks.

Loki gestures expansively to the food offered. “There are two plates,” he says without heat, sitting down in the chair at the head of the table. He points at the second place setting. “You can help yourself.”

So they sit and eat in silence, savoring the tangy, honey sweet of the sauce and the refreshing, subtle taste of the salmon. Thor makes low noises of pleasure in his throat as he shovels forkful after forkful of fish into his mouth, and Loki isn’t quite disgusted as he watches his brother eat, isn’t quite proud of himself, doesn’t know what he feels in all truth. Halfway through the meal, Thor looks up at Loki taking prissy, delicate bites of salmon and wonders out loud, “Why do you eat like such a girl?”

The comeback springing into his mouth without him even thinking twice, Loki finds the ceiling with his eyes and says, “Why do you eat like you’ve never touched food in your life?”

“It’s good shit, Loki,” Thor comments around a mouthful of fish, practically moaning at the taste. “You really know how to cook.”

“You’d know too, if you tried,” Loki shoots back. Sarcastic and acidic as his manner is, it is as civil as he’s going to get, and strangely enough, things feel okay.

Thor shakes his head a little, smearing his last little dab of fish in sauce that has collected on his plate and smiling a wry smile. “I’m just surprised that food you like could be as good as this,” he says in a way that doesn’t sound derisive or mean, just matter-of-fact.

Loki, on his way to finishing his own dinner, laughs a little despite his desire to be utterly inscrutable. “Wait until I make you a grilled cheese,” he says with a nigh-imperceptible wink, then watches as Thor’s entire demeanor changes from leery to easy - the line of his mountainous shoulders smoothing out, his brow unfurrowing. Thor swallows.

“Is that a promise?” he asks, holding out one pinky finger. Suddenly they are prepubescent again, and Loki feels as though the entire world has shifted. He hooks his left pinky into Thor’s right.

“It’s a deal,” he pronounces easily, slipping into and back out of the person he was seven years ago with ease. He washes the dishes alone, and goes to bed feeling changed, profoundly young.

The month passes in a blur of video games, good food, and the echoes of childhood. On Thursdays and Sundays, after Loki and Thor do linear algebra and their readings for Women, Religion, and Culture, Thor puts a controller in Loki’s hand and teaches him how to play  _ Grand Theft Auto _ . It doesn’t go all that great at first. Thor is a yeller and a very vocal gamer, which doesn’t jive well with Loki’s much more taciturn, don’t-yell-at-me-please style. The first  _ GTA _ Thursday nearly ends in tears, with Loki throwing the controller at Thor’s thick head and screeching at him, “I quit! I’m out of here! Fuck off forever!” The following Sunday, on which Thor only barely manages to convince Loki to play again, they war with each other some more, with Thor barking fair and honest directives such as, “Shoot that motherfucker!” and “Drive straighter, dude!” until once again, Loki leaves the room swearing off video games for the rest of his days. Finally, on Thursday, January 18th, Loki lays down the law.

“You can’t raise your voice at me,” he says as they load up his save from the weekend. “If you want me to do something or you’re trying to help me, just fucking say it like a normal person instead of yelling like I’m a mile away.”

Thor makes a grumbling noise in his throat, obviously dissatisfied with this rule. “Life is so much better when it’s loud, though.”

“Oh, boohoo.” Feeling impish, Loki sticks his tongue out at his brother. “You’re the one who wants me to play this so bad. We’re either going to do it my way or we’re not going to do it at all.”

It’s been a very long time since Thor let Loki have his way. Loki thinks he remembers it - they were infants, and Thor let the new baby have his favorite pacifier. Thor openly struggles with this surrender, with this willing concession of authority. Eventually, though, he sighs and says, “Whatever you say, Loki. I just hope you’ll actually listen to what I’m saying this time.”

“Maybe I will now that you’re using your inside voice,” Loki remarks not quite snidely. Tonight is a success, and they are taking baby steps.

Loki catches himself being forgetful. Forgetful of everything unimportant in his life, of his petty drama with various Marvelites, of Thor’s varied and assorted major and minor flaws, of his own age-old animosity and the way it has so dominated his life for the past four to seven years. He does his homework with his brother, lives in this comfy two-bedroom house with his brother, eats dinner on Thursdays and Sundays with his brother, and it is as if the entirety of the world - all his bitchy text messages with Amora and Namor and his little academic stresses and even his nightmares about his father and the car accident, obliterated in the morning with his first smoke of the day - all of it has faded away. It’s a welcome change.

It is the last week of the month when all the good feelings and the accidental forgetfulness comes to a frightful end. It starts at 3:33 AM on Monday the 22nd, when Loki is awoken with a start by a barrage of text messages.

  
  


> **Today** 3:33 AM
> 
> **tony stark  
>  ** Are you awake? I need to talk to you
> 
> Jesus Loki you of all people can’t be sleeping right now, I remember last year when you’d stay awake all night writing your dumb poetry and smoking weed and shit. When did you get so responsible all of a sudden, huh?
> 
> Speaking of responsible
> 
> I fucked up
> 
> Haha
> 
> I’m so drunk right now it’s unbelievable. I can’t even see the television and I am soooooo warm
> 
> What’s on the menu you ask? First I was like, maybe I’ll have a beer, you know Rhodey keeps beers in the house because he trusts me and he likes to test me (he’s weird like that, he’s a weird friend to have), so I had one beer. It was a nice one. A Corona, because Rhodey has good taste
> 
> So then I drank the rest of his beer haha
> 
> Then I decided I wanted whiskey sours, because I remembered that time when u were in long island and we had whiskey sours and we danced in my bedroom to the strokes because you like loud indie music like that (u have the best taste in music btw), and all of a sudden u wanted to go to the beach so we went to the beach
> 
> And then I was like…. sex on the beach
> 
> So vodka and schnapps [woozy face emoji]
> 
> Then I went for a drive and thought about life for awhile and that was fun
> 
> Obviously I was driving the whole time because all this alcohol is not in the house lmao
> 
> And now I’m home from the bar and the store making sangria and thinkin about u and like I need u right now, Loki
> 
> Your the only one who understands what it’s like to be this fucked up
> 
> Please call me tomorrow when u wake up I’ll answer even if I’m passed out
> 
> Do u think we’re going to die?? Do u think we’re going to die one day soon? I thnk maybe I will 

  
  


At this point, Loki turns his phone onto Do Not Disturb and screams into his pillow, shuddering with fear. Tony is relapsing, and suddenly he is the one who has to clean up the mess.

He doesn’t respond to Tony’s texts. Not through Monday and not through Tuesday. Tuesday night, while Loki is smoking it up and watching  _ Jersey Shore _ with Amora in his bedroom - perfect for this crisp January evening in Alaska - Tony starts calling Loki over and over again in what can only be described as a perfect manic storm, starting out spacing his calls so that they occur once every twenty minutes or so and gradually, over the course of an hour and a half, increasing the frequency to about a call every five minutes, to the point where Loki thinks the world is going to end.

At the twentieth instance of “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” Amora throws a pillow at the wall and makes this horrific shrieking noise at the top of her lungs. “Block him!” she cries. “Block him or turn your fucking phone off because I cannot handle this anymore! I will not tolerate Tony Fucking Stark ruining my flawless Tuesday!”

Loki looks at his phone with pity as he powers it down. Later in the night, when he is settling down to sleep at around midnight, he turns his phone back on and listens to the confusing voicemail Tony left him at 9:54 PM, after a whopping fifty-nine missed calls.

“Loki,” Tony says, in a breathless and high voice that Loki knows so well from the previous academic year, from Yuletide, from the Spring semester, from summer in Long Island. He’s coked up. This is ADHD/bipolar mania mixed with some kind of upper, and Tony always did love his nose candy. “I know you’re probably mad at me but I really can’t imagine why. The last time I saw you you left all of a sudden like I’d said something that offended you and I really want to apologize, I do, I just need you to let me know what I did. You’re really sensitive like that, and I like you Loki - I really, really like you - but sometimes you’re hard to be vulnerable with because you’re so touchy. It’s like everything I could possibly say to you could break you, and that’s a weird power trip, isn’t it?” He laughs.

“Anyway - I need to talk to you. I miss you, and things are getting bad with Pepper now, she’s starting to get tired of me. You see, she only took me back on the condition that I stay clean and sober and do good things, and I did that all last semester - I was fuckin’ acing it, you had never seen me so perfect. And you liked it, too - I know you liked it, I know that was the only reason you started acting friendly with me again. But now - obviously I’m not clean and sober. I don’t know if you could tell but I just railed two lines and I’m feeling fucking  _ great _ . The only thing is I don’t have you.” Tony clears his throat, and it is the first time in about thirty seconds that Loki breathes. 

“I know you want me to be perfect Tony,” Tony says. “I know you always wanted me to be clean and sober - you were always the one telling me I could be better than I was, and you believed in me and wanted to be with me that way. I’m sorry, kid, but I can’t be your perfect sober guy. But I know you’d take me any way I am, and that’s why I’m calling you. I need to see you. Please give me a call, or text me, or something. I’ll be waiting.”  _ End of voicemail _ , Loki’s phone pronounces in a robotic, vaguely female tone.

Loki realizes with an abrupt, violent start that Tony has no idea - has never known - what he’s done wrong. He doesn’t know what he did wrong at Starbucks in December, he doesn’t know what he did wrong last summer when he summarily dumped Loki for Pepper Potts after two months of bliss and pseudo-romance. Anger and sympathy overtake him like a tide, and he doesn’t know if he wants to give in to Tony - to take him any way he was, just as he so boldly proclaimed he would - or run away into the darkest and safest hole. He thinks about what Namor would do, then deletes the voicemail so he can’t listen to it over and over again like a maniac.

Wednesday passes without incident. Loki and Thor sit next to each other in Women, Religion, and Culture and Thor finally formally introduces Loki to both Bruce Banner and the Maximoff twins, who heretofore have only known Loki in passing as the sophomore who spit in Steve Rogers’ face at that Avengers party that one time last year, yada yada yada. Loki can see the realization in their faces that he’s just a normal if slightly bitchy and aloof person, and it’s kind of nice, having a chance to retool his reputation so late in his academic career. He never thought he’d have that. 

Then it’s Thursday. Thor helps Loki through a particularly difficult module in his linear algebra textbook and a particularly difficult mission in his  _ GTA _ game. Watching Loki stumble through his evening - hitting Thor’s bong with shaking hands and nearly shaving the pad of his thumb off as he slices cucumbers for dinner and mashing all the wrong buttons when he plays video games - Thor looks at Loki hard at the stroke of 10:00 and says, “What’s up with you today? You’re all distracted.”

Loki wants to run away from Thor, too. As much of a bluntly, sort of ferociously honest and vulnerable person as he is, he doesn’t know how to be frank with Thor about Tony Stark and the mess he’s made of that whole situation. He doesn’t want Thor to gloat at him, because Thor was right - all of this is, ultimately, his fault.

“I don’t know, Thor,” he lies, trying for a sheepish smile. “Guess I’m just a little burnt out already. Ready to get this year well and over with.”

“You’re preaching to the choir.” Thor peers at Loki sideways where they’re sitting on the sofa, and he looks ready to launch into a tirade about his own plight as a senior, but softens a bit and says, “Go to bed. You actually did kind of good today.”

Loki rolls his eyes. “You really don’t have to praise me like a lapdog.”

“I’m not, I’m just saying.” Thor nudges him with his shoulder. “You’re getting the hang of this algebra shit. A-plus for Loki.”

Loki gives Thor a dirty look, puts his controller down, and heads to his bedroom. Stopping at the doorway, he turns back to his brother and says, “I’ll do the dishes tomorrow. Goodnight.” He doesn’t wait for Thor’s reply before he’s closing the door behind him and peeling all his clothes off to get in his pajamas.

He dozes fitfully. Fenris bowwows and complains about his constant shifting, eventually going to sleep in a big puppyish heap on the floor. At midnight, when all the house but him sleeps, he is forced to forfeit the exercise entirely when suddenly, his phone begins to vibrate and chime over and over and over again.

  
  


> **Today** 12:00 AM
> 
> **tony stark  
>  ** Come to the door 
> 
> Come to the door 
> 
> Come to the door 
> 
> Come to the door 
> 
> Come to the door 
> 
> Come to the door 
> 
> Come to the door 
> 
> Come to the door 
> 
> Come to the door 
> 
> Come to the door 

  
  


Loki wonders for a hot second if his life has really entered horror movie territory and makes his way to the front door. When he opens it, it is snowing and Tony is there in his leather jacket, smoking a cigarette. Loki takes him in with wide, frantic eyes.

“What, are you fucking crazy?” are the first words that spring to his lips. 

“Maybe,” Tony replies with a quickness, and then he is there, leaning into the doorway and into Loki’s face at this cold, desolate hour. His breath is warm on Loki’s face. “Why haven’t you been answering my texts and calls?”

“Maybe because I don’t want to talk to you anymore?” Loki’s tone is crisp, as mean as he can get it to be without barging into wholesale viciousness. 

Tony looks confused. “Why not?”

Loki scoffs. “Go back to bed with Pepper, Tony. I can’t do this with you anymore.”

Tony looks desperate, dangerously drunk, eyes lidded and mouth loose around the corners. He reeks of menthol, liquor, and adrenaline, the way you can smell fear and simple electric verve in a spooked animal. He’s leaning really heavily into the doorway, looking like he might just cry if not fall over and faceplant, and it’s enough to lower Loki’s defenses and his voice enough to ask, “What do you want?”

Tony exhales sweet, pungent alcohol air and closes his eyes. “I don’t know,” he breathes. When he opens his eyes, he’s surging forward to nuzzle into Loki’s cheek, warm breath cascading over his mouth and chin, and it’s too much, too close - Loki recoils from the touch, knowing he was  _ this  _ close to kissing Tony Stark for the first time in over six months. 

Tony’s father - the Stark - used to be like this. Starting affairs even while entangled in a marriage-like arrangement (or, after a while, an actual marriage) with the perfect woman. Tony has been and will be a momma’s boy until the very end, but there’s no doubting that he’s his father’s child - a carbon copy, an imperfect automaton committing all the man’s successes and failures in his young life. Loki knows this because Tony used to tell him everything, back when he was an addict with no interest in recovering and Loki was one of the many apples of his eye, the only person he could confide all this stuff in.

Across the doorway, they stand and watch each other. Tony pleads with his eyes, and Loki could let him in the house to drink water from the tap (he’s always loved listening to Tony complain about “poor people’s water” and display his other such eccentricities that come from having way too much money than one knows what to do with), to play with his puppy, to sit on his bed and talk with him and maybe kiss him into the morning’s wee hours, how hard he aches for Loki - but instead, Loki hardens his heart once more and says, “I’m not participating. Goodnight, Tony.”

“Loki, please,” Tony keens. “I want to be with you again.”

It is the thing Loki has so wanted to hear for so long, several months and too many heartbreaks too late. Loki closes his eyes and closes the door, flicking the lock and sliding the deadbolt shut without a second thought. He puts his ear against the door and listens intently for the noises of the outside - the white, staticky swirl of snow, perhaps the sound of footsteps. He only knows when Tony is gone because after five minutes of this listening, he grows frustrated with the exercise and opens the door to Sleipnir and Thor’s Hummer the driveway, but no ex-lovers lurking with their flashy sports cars and their sad, sad cigarettes. He knows he’s in college and he knows every college student is afforded the luxury of at least one bad romance, but he wonders into the harsh, unforgiving descent of snow - “Why me?”

Why him indeed?

He remembers last year, when Tony was coked up and crazy and all in his shit, trying in vain to get Loki to give into him, Niagara Falls in his force and his strength and his magnetism. As Loki pulls the covers over his head, hiding from the cold world and this monster partially of his own making, he recalls the storm of two Decembers ago. Tony Stark the football star was in love with Steve Rogers his captain; was particularly not sober and was working on a dependence on alcohol as well as cocaine and, occasionally, meth; was eating girls’ pussies between and during classes and called Loki his “favorite future ex-husband,” because they bickered like an old married couple; was fucked up, famous, and fantastically codependent. It was about to be Christmas, and Tony’s plan to win Steve Rogers’ heart (which, to be fair, was doomed from the start due to Steve’s entanglement in a long-term relationship with Peggy Carter and the fact that Tony and Steve were barely even friends to begin with) had failed in utterly catastrophic fashion. The two footballers were living together with Thor, Bruce, and Clint, and every day when Tony laid his heart bare on his sleeve in the kitchen or outside of the bathroom door or out by the firepit with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other, Steve rejected him first with grace, then with force, then with outright violence. That’s what Tony told Loki when he came to his dorm on a Friday night, thin stream of blood running from his nose down his chin.

“He punched you?” Loki asked, letting Tony into the little two-bedroom dormitory apartment he shared with Namor at the time. Immediately, Tony was going into the kitchen and grabbing Loki and Namor’s conspicuous bottle of pinot grigio, rooting around for a bottle-opener like the place was his (and to be fair, every place was his because he had the money to buy it). Tony snorted bloodily.

“Yeah, I think he’s getting tired of the whole, ‘ _ we were destined to be together _ ’ thing. Maybe I should change my tune.” Finally, Tony procured a bottle opener and proceeded to weasel his way into the pinot, which he drank straight from the bottle. He gave Loki a self-satisfied smirk. “Bigmouth strikes again, eh?”

Tony knew that the Smiths tune was Loki’s ringtone for him. Tony didn’t know how Loki felt about him - they had been dancing together for a few months, flirting over coffee and on the quad and sometimes when Tony had him over at the Avengers’ house of fun, but Loki never betrayed his particular tenderness toward him and he planned on keeping things this way. Tony must have known  _ something _ though, because this is the only reason why he chose Loki on that night - not Pepper Potts or Maya Hansen or Natasha Romanoff or any of the other random women (and sometimes men) he liked to stick his metaphorical or literal dick into. He came to Loki in his living room and said, “Sometimes it feels like I’m going to die alone.”

Loki rolled his eyes, feeling self-conscious in his pajamas in front of Tony Stark, the most famous person on campus. “Nobody as rich as you dies alone.”

“Can I tell you something crazy?” Tony asked, getting all up in his face. Taking a short swig of pinot and watching Loki nervously sputter around for a reply, he barrelled on ahead and said, “I think this is it. I think this is the defining moment of my life. Either I’m going to fall in love right now and find the person who’s going to be with me through it all, or it’s for nothing. Fuck the world.”

Loki understood this with crystal clarity. He also had the very borderline desire to fall in love and turn into a god and fly away from the Earth by the time he was approximately 25, though he divulged this in no one but Amora and Namor. Tony was breathing really fast, and Loki could feel that breath on his face, and this confused him. What was going on? What was Tony Stark doing here in his house on a Friday night before Christmas, drinking Namor’s wine and talking about love?

“Come sit down,” Loki said with practiced calmness, moving to the little piece-of-shit sofa with the afghan draped on top of it so that it didn’t look quite as cheap and pathetic. He felt anxious having Tony Stark bear witness to his inconspicuous ownership of non-luxury goods, as obnoxiously consumerist as Tony always was. Still - he got Tony to sit and sat down with his legs under him beside him, watched Tony take a long, gluttonous drag of wine from the bottle until his brown eyes rolled in the back of his head. Eventually, he asked, “What have you been taking?”

“What are you talking about?” Tony slurred, his head lolling a little along the back of the sofa - not a good sign.

“I mean, what have you ingested in the past four-to-six hours?” Loki pushed, trying to sound big and bad in his plaid Catholic schoolgirl shorts.

“Uhh… let’s see.” Tony blinked slowly, his mouth ajar as though it took some effort to breathe. “I started out with some Yeunglings this afternoon after vomiting up breakfast because, you know, Steve. And then after the Yeunglings I was still thirsty so I drove to the Polar Bar and hung out with Ulysses Klaue - that, that weird South African dude with the scar on his face - we drank martinis and Cosmos for a while. Very  _ Sex and the City _ . After a while it’s 5:30 and I’m starting to feel sleepy, so I proceed to go home and do a few lines and take a cold shower. That wakes me right up, but I’m lonely. I’m trying not to be lonely. That’s when, heh, that’s when all this shit happened.” Tony gestured expansively to his blood-stained face, grinning sickly sweet. “So I did a few more lines and then I drank a beer on my way here and now I’m drinking your wine and that’s… a lot.”

Loki stared insanely into Tony’s face, into his living and breathing form. “Hello? How are you still alive?”

“I’ve been doing this shit for a long time, kid,” Tony said proudly, with eyes that were totally black. He sat up, put the bottle of wine on the floor, and took Loki’s hands in his own. “We should make out,” he proposed.

Loki resisted the urge to laugh hysterically. Then, the only people he’d made out with had been Fandral in his freshman year and Amora that one time they got really drunk. Tony Stark was fun to flirt with, but to swap spit with? The idea was insane. “What are you talking about?” he asked as Tony’s hand found his face, the fingers beginning to trace down the angled line of Loki’s jaw. 

“C’mon, Loki, it’s like you haven’t even been listening.” Tony leaned in closer, telegraphing breath and affection into Loki’s face, and his voice got low and thready. “We’re here together tonight. Didn’t you wonder why? I’m choosing you.”

Loki frowned a hard, painful frown. He was then so confused, but not nearly as confused as he’d grow to be in the following winter. Tony was breathing funny, so Loki put his fingers to his pulse and felt the strange, staccato thump of his heart, too fast for health. He asked, “Are you feeling okay? Your pulse is scary.”

Tony moaned a little, touching a hand to his chest. “I feel like my chest is going to explode,” he mumbled, then released a violent stream of boozey vomit onto the living room floor, thankfully missing both of their persons altogether.

This was an emergency. Loki had watched girls who’d gotten white girl wasted get carried out of his dormitory and into the backs of ambulances during his freshman year, had borne some witness to Thor’s own alcoholic messes from time to time since he turned sixteen. He knew that Tony Stark was not okay, which was why he managed through bribery and pure and dirty seduction to get the man into the passenger seat of his truck, which he then drove in the direction of the nearest emergency room.

“You think my heart’s gonna explode?” Tony half-yelled into the sound of Loki’s radio, the alt-rock blaring out of the auxiliary channel. Loki turned the radio down and tried to focus on driving through the moderate fall of snow, the roads icy, the moon new.

“You don’t have a heart,” Loki replied without thinking, because he knew this from every rumor he’d ever heard through the grapevine about some person Tony Stark had fucked or fucked over. He knew this from Tony’s absolute flippancy even in the face of mortal danger that he’d brought upon himself. Tony was cynical and selfish and cared for nothing but money, things, and any rush of dopamine worth chasing, but he mistook this for romanticism, for real love, for his father’s imprint on his disordered personality. Loki knew all this, and somehow, Tony was weaseling his way into his heart, or at the very least the better part of his nighttime thoughts.

Tony laughed and leaned his head into the window. “I don’t have a heart because I gave it to you,” was his overly cute reply, and they both hated it and said nothing about it. The music blared on and they neared Alaska Regional, unspeaking, hearts beating fast and loud.

Tony Stark did not have a heart attack that night. Emergency room personnel returned blood flow to the heart and restored the body with oxygen-rich blood, especially for the brain to reduce the risk of stroke. Tony cried about everything, about his father and about Steve Rogers - “Why the fuck is he so special?” he asked the room, of which consisted no one but Loki and the bag of IV fluids. “Why can’t he love someone like me?” Loki just listened, and when Tony asked him to climb into the wheeled emergency room bed with him, to put his arms around him and lean on him while he tried to get some sleep, Loki did that too.

Loki and Tony liked to watch each other eat, as much as they both despised all the munching in those times. Really, they wanted to watch each other sleep, and that’s what they did that night in the emergency room - slept, watching each other, taking turns and making sure the other was comfortable. It wasn’t the way they had planned for it to be, but that’s the way it worked out at the time.

On the last Sunday of January, Loki runs a cold. He doesn’t get out of bed until noon, and even then he only does so to use the bathroom and grab a roll of toilet tissue to snot and sneeze into. At 2:00, he is scrolling through Netflix for a movie from his late childhood/early adolescence to watch - a  _ Bring It On! _ or a  _ High School Musical _ \- when his phone rings, and it is only because the refrain of “You Can’t Hurry Love” starts to play that Loki does not promptly lose his mind or do something drastic like call the police to report a stalker. He answers the phone with a sneeze. “Hello?”

“Oh, Loki!” comes Mother’s sympathetic voice over the line. “Are you sick? You sound sick.”

“It’s just a head cold, Mom,” Loki says in his most flippant tone, the flippancy somewhat ruined by his nasality. “What’s going on?”

“I just wanted to check in, you know,” Mother replies in her velvet voice. “Would you like me to drive over a pot of chicken noodle soup? Are you staying hydrated?”

“Please don’t worry about me,” Loki pleads with a sigh, looking over his spread of snacks, tissue, and insulation from the cold. “I’ve got like three bottles of Gatorade and I’ve just been eating Thor’s chips and stuff. It’s kind of nice to pig out.”

Mother makes a humming noise in the back of her throat. “You got Thor that job. I’m proud of you, honey.”

“Oh my God, are we talking about Thor? I’m not gut-sick but I’m going to throw up.”

“According to your brother, the two of you have actually been getting along for the past month,” Mother says in her unbearable/adorable  _ I’m-proud-of-you _ voice.

“Yeah, because now we’re not arguing about everything under the sun and he’s not spraining my ankles and wrists,” Loki replies smartly. 

“That’s progress, Loki!” Mother exclaims. “Don’t you see that as a good thing? I can tell you right now that at the beginning of this academic year, you never thought you’d be eating dinner and studying with your brother. Did you?”

Loki sniffles, makes a soft grumbling noise he hopes the phone doesn’t pick up. “I didn’t,” he admits in a crisp voice. 

“Be proud,” Mother purrs. “You have nowhere to go but up with Thor, and I know things are never going to be the same as they were before. I never hoped they would be. But maybe they can be better now. What do you think?”

Loki looks at his open doorway, Thor’s doorway across the hall from his. Somewhere beyond his line of sight, his brother is lazing around just as he is, some tranquil person Loki doesn’t ever recall him being, and why? Because of what happened with Sif and Jane? Because football season is over? Because of the horror that was this past Christmas and the revelation that occurred between him and Loki? Loki has no clue.

“I don’t know, Mom,” he says with a wet sniff. “I’m just trying to make it one day at a time.”

“Aren’t we all?” Mother’s dulcet laugh is sweet, soothing over the phone. Loki lets her talk about her day for a few minutes, intermittently making the right noises and offering his own remarks, and when he starts to sneeze uncontrollably, they end the call with a quick exchange of  _ I love you _ s so that Loki can go decompress his skull in the bathroom sink. 

On the way back to his room, he meets Thor in the hallway. They look at each other, sleepy on this Sunday afternoon, and Thor asks at Loki’s runny nose and overall look of illness, “You sick?”

Loki just nods and toddles off to his room. “I’m going to go simulate death for a few hours.”

Thor chuckles, moving in the direction of the kitchen. “Have fun, weirdo,” he says. Loki leaves his door open as he naps.


	7. FEBRUARY

#  _ FEBRUARY _

Loki talks to his psychiatrist on the first day of February. He talks of nightmares and fitful sleep, of anxiety attacks that hit him on the way to class and in the middle of his shift at work, sending him to the bathroom to breathe hard over the sink and ignore the strange looks he gets from passersby. When the good doctor asks if there has been any significant change in his life, Loki doesn’t want to talk about it - doesn’t want to go into the mess of Tony Stark and his unclear feelings about the matter - so he lies like he lies and says, “School is stressful right now. I feel very perceived in class. I’ve actually been popping Benadryl just to sleep at night.” This, as it turns out, gets him exactly what he wants: a prescription for an anxiolytic that will take the edge off as needed. Picking up his orange thirty-count bottle of lorazepam two milligrams from the Walgreens closest to the apartment, Loki feels devilish in a way that decidedly isn’t fun; instead, it’s just depressing.

That night, after he and Thor have done their homework, eaten dinner, played  _ Grand Theft Auto _ , and are winding down with a couple of bowls of their various cannabis strains (Runtz for Thor, Trainwreck for Loki) and a tiny white lorazepam pill, there is a knock on the door that neither brother expects. Exchanging curious looks with each other as Thor stands and moves to the door, the two of them are both sort of holding their breath as Thor opens the door and finds Sif standing on the other side in a bright red parka, her hair down and a kind of sorry look on her face. Loki is instantly uncomfortable and wishes to be anywhere but here.

“Hey, Sif,” Thor says kind of stiffly, making himself big in the doorway. Sif’s expression dampens even further if possible.

“Hi, Thor,” she says, hands in her pockets. “I know I probably should have called before just barging over here - that’s kind of what got me in trouble the last time, right? - but I, uh. Ahem. Could I come outside and talk to you? No yelling, I promise.”

Listening to all of this, Loki grabs up his pipe, his lighter, his little jar of Trainwreck, and his ashtray and moves in the direction of his bedroom, spying the hole in the drywall from last month’s fight that has yet to be fixed. He doesn’t say goodnight to Thor or announce to anyone that he’s going to bed, just quietly excuses himself and acts like he’s not listening through the crack in his bedroom to what little snippets of Thor and Sif’s conversation he can catch.

“I don’t want to be this girl, Thor,” he hears Sif say, earnest and bare and with a sort of throatiness to her voice that makes Loki wonder if, horror of horrors, the woman is crying. 

“You used to be my best friend, man,” Thor says at one point, sounding sort of anguished. Loki takes a long, deep hit off of his pipe and lets his eyes water as he blows a Chinese dragon of smoke out.

“Every time something funny happens, I want to tell you,” Sif admits, and Loki waits for it, for Thor’s immediate and genuine answer.

“Then tell me.” Loki supposes there is peace between them now.

The next morning, Loki wakes to a bizarre series of text messages from about the last person he expects to be texting him at this time of the year.

  
  


> **Today** 7:25 AM
> 
> **hela skywalker  
> ** Good morning, Loki. How are you, how is life, blah blah blah I need to talk to you
> 
> I am literally going to kill a small animal or a homeless person today if I do not get a) a hard drink, b) a nice and long vent sesh, and/or c) at least one small orgasm. I am not going to ask you to provide a or c (for self-evident reasons), but I am putting in a formal request for b
> 
> Request sent, please reply asap
> 
> I am partial to Dark Horse Coffee Co which I know is close to your place so let me know when you want to meet for an espresso 

  
  


Loki stares at his phone for five minutes, trying to puzzle out exactly what could have shaken his sister up so much that she resorted to adolescent venting with her half-brother that she has never particularly cared for. Shaking his head and rolling his eyes at the ceiling, he taps out a half-awake reply.

  
  


> **loki skywalker  
> ** i’m free from 10:30 to 1:30? shall we meet at noon?
> 
> **hela skywalker  
> ** If your ass isn’t there I’m not to be held responsible for what lives shall be lost

  
  


“Whatever, Hela,” Loki says into his pillow and then gets up to go relieve himself, wash his face, brush his hair and teeth, and generally get ready for the day.

Loki is at Dark Horse at precisely noon, toting his backpack with all his books and laptop in it and padded down in his thick vegan leather jacket, his sherpa hoodie, his wool scarf and gloves. He orders an avocado toast on sourdough bread with Dukkah seasoning and feta cheese, a bottle of water, and a macchiato, then waits for Hela to come bustling in in her severe black trenchcoat and her stiletto boots - which she does at about 12:05. As Hela zeroes in on him with her gaze, Loki gives her a flippant little wave, mouthing, “You’re late,” with an emphatic upward curl of his mouth’s left corner. Hela flips him off, then goes to order an espresso and a bacon and onion quiche at the front counter. 

“Please tell me you left that girl a tip,” Loki says to his sister when she comes to sit across from him at one of the coffeehouse’s various tables. “She was really nice and she works hard for the money.”

“She gets her paycheck,” Hela says scornfully, swallowing down a whole mouthful of hot black coffee and not batting an eyelash. Loki would not have expected her to come any other way.

“So what’s new today?” Loki asks over the lip of his macchiato, affecting a sarcastic smile that evinces just how done with social niceties he perpetually is. “What small villages are on the agenda to burn? Are we adequately stocked with child sacrifices to consume around dinnertime? Are the revolutionaries sufficiently cowed into hiding in fear?”

“Oh, Loki, this is why I always love to see you and not the other members of our so-called family,” Hela comments drolly, stabbing her fork into her quiche and cutting off a bite-sized portion to pop into her mouth. “You’re the only one with a worthwhile sense of humor, with a sense of style and sarcasm and wit that is so top-tier instead of that generic white bread bullshit your mother and brother like to call comedy.”

“Come on, Hela.” Loki shakes his head a little bit and bites into his toast, taking a moment to chew and let his sister possibly reflect on how unfair she’s being (which, to be sure, is ironic considering that he hates their family as well). “What I said wasn’t actually all that creative or witty. It was just mean.”

“Meanness is always an adequate substitute for wit,” Hela remarks without missing a beat. Loki rolls his eyes.

“Just tell me what’s going on,” he says. “I was surprised to get your text this morning, to be honest. I don’t know if I fancy being the first-string sibling.”

“Shut up,” Hela snarls, giving him an ugly look. Without warning, her expression changes from one of scorn to one of near-total vulnerability - her blue eyes wide and open and almost childish beneath the heavy black stripe of eyeliner and the smoky shadow on her lids. She frowns, simple and sad, and pushes a hand into her loose black hair. “I had dinner with Father last night,” she starts, and Loki can’t help himself - he’s immediately piping in again with another somewhat smart comment.

“I figured he had a hand in this,” he notes with a snort, sipping again from his huge black coffee mug. “Only he gets under your skin like this.”

“I’m never going to be what he wants,” Hela goes on as if Loki hasn’t said anything, her eyes on some distant place near the ceiling and her thoughts obviously with their patriarch. “I’m smart, Loki. You know I’m smart. And maybe I’m not a good person - maybe I drink too much and I’m ‘unladylike’ as he so loves to call me and I’m slightly oversexed and vulgar and I don’t know how to take no for an answer. I’m not a perfect person, I’m not even good, but the thing is that I’m smart and I kick ass and I’m great at my job. I graduated at the top of my class and I’m a better, more daring architect than Odin Skywalker ever was. I’m making one-hundred and ten thousand dollars a year and I’m only halfway through my twenties. I live in my house that I own, I go on vacation-” Suddenly, Hela is frenzied instead of just sorrowful; throwing her hands in the air and cutting herself off with a guttural noise of frustration, she is a jungle cat that has been touched the wrong way, her hackles raised and her fur standing on end. “I’m fucking  _ killing _ it at this life thing, don’t you get it?! But because I don’t have a penis between my legs, I’m not our father’s golden son, the one he’s going to pass Asgard on off to when he retires or dies and who the board will defer to without question, not hesitating because I’m female or flawed or any of the other bullshit reasons they make up just to contradict me!” Making a fist in the air, Hela makes another frantic sound in her throat. “It’s like they all think I’m going to catch my period and destroy the empire!”

“Won’t you?” Loki asks, his last beat of playfulness.

Hela gives him a profoundly unimpressed look. “I will rip your head off,” she says with utmost seriousness.

“I have no doubt.” Thinking of Hela’s predicament as it has existed all her life - her the oldest daughter always unworthy of her father’s love and regard due to her femaleness and the inconvenient timing, place, and circumstance of her birth (out of wedlock, a subordinate employee mother, etc) - he wonders why it has been that he and Hela have not warred (not like he and Thor, none of the yelling and the physical violence and the blood pressures rising through the roof as one nation tried with all its might to crush the other), but simply not quite enjoyed the tense diplomatic relation they’ve always had for so long. He knows Hela resented him for actually being raised in their father’s house despite not even being his blood son - despite being so fundamentally  _ other _ and unrelated to the family that his adoption must have been the fluke of flukes - and he knows he resented her in turn just for disliking him so much. Hela was a goth girl who wrote poetry and practiced Old Norse witchcraft in high school; all things considered, she wasn’t very different from emo kid, playwriting/acting/producing, intermittently suicidal-Loki, and they could have actually been friends if they’d stopped being so immature once in all the years they’d spent growing up. They could be friends now, to be fair, but Hela’s most undesirable personality traits (her bitterness, her cynicism, her megalomania that is only slightly unlike her father’s) have already begun to crystallize permanently, while Loki has about a few years to go before he’s doomed to be an asshole for good. Loki clears his throat and sips some more coffee.

“You know he’s an asshole,” he says, trying to say the right thing because it matters and because she needs to hear it. “You already know you’re better than him, so why are you wasting your time being upset that he’s not, I don’t know, accepting you? Why do you need his acceptance?”

Hela stares into her espresso cup, trying to divine the answer. In a voice Loki has never heard come out of her before (and mind that he has never seen Hela cry, smear her makeup, laugh in a way that wasn’t ironic or mean, or experience flatulence), she replies, “I don’t know.” Her hands shaking - “It’s the only thing that matters in my life and I can’t have it. I’m so close.”

Loki thinks about sisters. This sitting around at a coffeeshop venting their innermost thoughts would be the type of thing they’d do more often if he had a vagina, he thinks, and it’s so funny - it’s almost cosmic - they’d switch sexes in a heartbeat if they could. He thinks of that old Kate Bush song from the 80s -  _ if I only could make a deal with God and get Him to swap our places _ \- and it takes a pinch of self-control not to just break off into laughter or song at the thought. Instead, he tries for a kind of optimism that only Hela would appreciate.

“Just wait,” he says after a bite of avocado toast. “Dad’s getting older. Sooner or later he’ll retire or get sick and be forced to retire, and you by rule of nepotism will slide right on in as head of the board and CEO of Asgard. You’re already in the home stretch and you know Thor is not, no matter what Dad wants or says, going to work at Asgard after he graduates unless everything else fails horribly.”

Hela huffs, her expression going perversely pleased. “I heard about Christmas. Dad still thinks he can win his boy over.”

“Dad is delusional,” Loki retorts quickly. “You don’t have to be just because he insists on driving you crazy by not loving and wanting you like you are. Do you think I give a shit about how he feels about me anymore?” He scoffs, diving in for another sip of his latte. “I don’t. I don’t want him to know anything about me.”

Hela looks at him for a long time, her face a screen of so many emotions and not one of them is able to fully dominate. Loki’s sister is having a meltdown, and for some reason, he’s the one nursing her through it.

On Monday, Loki and Thor are partnered together for a research project in Women, Religion, and Culture. They draw the same number randomly; smiling mysteriously ( _ has she been talking to our mother? _ , Loki wonders obliquely), Dr. Lawson clears her throat and says, “Should be an interesting project, boys.”

The object of the project is to prepare a research paper and presentation on a female religious figure as she has been portrayed in culture and media. On their second random draw, Loki and Thor pick  _ Mary, mother of Jesus - Roman Catholicism _ . For some reason, Loki immediately thinks again of their mother, and uttering in an undertone to himself, “How Freudian,” he ignores Thor’s strange look and immediately pulls up JSTOR on his laptop, keyword search:  _ virgin mary media _ . 

Over the course of a week and a half, the project balloons. For four straight nights, Loki is visited by a Marian apparition in his dreams - the Inuit Virgin Mary in the Gulf of Alaska, beckoning him closer, disappearing as soon as he’s within arm’s reach. It is the single most unsettling dream he has had in awhile - mind that he’s been having the King Kongs and Godzillas of nightmares more frequently as of late - and he wakes each morning ready to tackle this Virgin Mary project with gusto; watching clips of movies from the 50s, 70s, 90s, and 2000s during his lunch breaks and low periods at work; devouring papers on Mariology in fifteen-minute stretches. On Thursday, when he and Thor sit down together with all their notes and he shows up with a twenty-page document while Thor has a measly one and a half pages of handwritten notes in his notebook, Thor gives him the Look to end all looks.

“What?” Loki asks, ready to bite his head off.

“How do you do that?” Thor asks, snatching Loki’s MacBook off of the coffee table and scrolling through the twenty pages of meticulously bulleted, indented, labeled, and sublabeled notes. “Have you actually watched these movies? Like, all of them?”

“Not all the way through,” Loki says defensively, not knowing why he feel so angry all of a sudden. “I have a lot of free time at work. A fucking chimpanzee with a fidget-spinner could do my job.”

Thor laughs loudly, and it belatedly occurs to Loki that it’s the first time in recent memory that Thor has laughed at a joke he has consciously made. He’s still looking through Loki’s notes, having now passed into the sections on Mariology and Marian devotions, depictions, and feasts, and he’s making this low, whistling noise as he scrolls down into the nether regions of the document, where Loki has included pictures and citations. “ _ Wow _ ,” he utters.

“You’re a senior at a liberal arts university,” Loki says, looking at Thor as if he has sprouted a second head. “You’ve never taken notes to write a paper before?”

“Not like this, dude,” Thor says with an utter lack of smugness, with a surplus of - dare Loki says it - awe in Loki’s abilities. “I’m a STEM major, remember? And these little Humanities classes I’ve had to take now and then are just electives that I can reasonably bullshit my way through with help from my friends, you know. I’ve taken notes and written papers before, but it doesn’t mean the same thing to me that it means to you.” Thor sort of frowns a little, putting Loki’s laptop back down on the coffee table. “To you, this is what you want to do for the rest of your life. To me, this is what I’m doing now to  _ eventually _ get to the place where I do what I want to do for the rest of my life.” He shakes his head. “I just said a lot of words.”

Loki, feeling some type of way he hasn’t felt in quite a long time, puts his hand down on Thor’s shoulder. “I get it,” he says, then clearing his throat and moving his hand away, turns back to his laptop. “You can keep talking if you want. It helps me to figure out how we’re going to actually do this project.”

Thor looks down at his handwritten notes, his vague sketches of Mary in the margins of the page and his jottings on how the virgin is depicted in Renaissance art. “I really liked looking at the pictures of her,” he says. “It was interesting. Artists always painted her in blue because they thought of her as like an empress, but also because the dyes they used came from lapis lazuli, which was more valuable than gold.” Thor looks at Loki, who is watching him - utterly fixated - as he speaks. “I just thought that was really cool.”

Loki is struck as if by lightning bolt with an idea. “You should do the presentation.” He gestures expansively to all their notes. “You’ll use everything we’ve taken down so far and do whatever you want with it, and just leave the paper to me. I’m better at that part anyway.” Without waiting for Thor’s response, he clicks the  _ Share _ button at the top right of his Google Doc and asks, “What’s your school email? I should probably be able to guess just by your name, but I can’t think about that right now.”

Thor stares, gobsmacked, at Loki for a moment that seems to last for years. Then, without a second thought, he types his email into Loki’s little share module and clicks the big blue button, saying, “Okay, man. I guess that’s that.”

For the rest of their allotted study time, they do Loki’s algebra homework. That night, when Loki dreams of the Inuit Virgin, she is a barely pubescent girl in a traditional caribou parka, fishing. She speaks a language he doesn’t understand, and still she disappears as soon as he thinks he’ll reach her. 

“ _ Fuck _ ,” Loki pronounces into his pillow, turning over in his sleep and cuddling into Fenris’ fur.

Valentine’s Day falls on a Wednesday this year. As they did the previous year, Loki and Amora decide to go on a date in lieu of trying to find someone else to kiss and/or fuck on this, the most romantic night of the year. This has been their tradition since the disaster that was Valentine’s Day 2016, when Amora nearly got date-raped trying to pick up upperclassmen at Polar Bar and Loki and Namor were forced to swoop in and save her.  _ No more Valentine’s chicanery _ is the third rule of their collective friendship; this, on this February 14th, Loki picks Amora up in Sleipnir and drives her off to Southside Bistro in southern Anchorage. As Loki stands by and Amora shrugs into her leather jacket - her all dolled up in a witchy green velvet dress, heeled booties, and punk rock makeup - she sighs and says, “Looks like our secret pact to marry each other if we haven’t found anyone else by the age of thirty is still going strong.”

Namor, from where he’s sitting on the living room couch petting the black void of the cat, makes an ugly face like a child. “The weight of this betrayal, I swear,” he says in a huffy sort of voice, smoothing his slick hair back over his forehead with his hand not petting the cat.

“Don’t worry,  _ mitt hjärta _ .” Amora goes to pat Namor on his toasted hazelnut face, grinning with a dark purple mouth. “We can still all have bendy sex together.”

Loki puts two dorky thumbs up and says, “That’s what I’m talking about.” He and Amora sing along to The Strokes all the way to the restaurant, voices loud, the truck’s interior warm.

They order a wood oven brie flatbread, angel hair pasta, Patagonia pink prawns and sea scallops with peppers, tomatoes, herbs, and bistro rice. They split the hefty price of an Inglenook Cabernet Sauvignon, planning to down the whole bottle before they leave tonight. Loki is feeling self-destructive, feeling like his brother, feeling like a hypocrite wanting to drive wine drunk through the snow. Once he and Amora start drinking, they are able to be more honest than they ever are (and they’ve made vulnerability into an art form).

“Who shall go first?” Amora asks, holding her glass of Cab Sav in the air and peering into the ceiling of the little bistro, which is decorated all with pink, magenta, and deep violet streamers and red and silver balloons shaped like puffy emoji hearts. Flicking stray blonde hairs out of her face, she gives Loki a grin that would be predatory if it wasn't him she was talking to and if she wasn’t so sad. “Who is having the worst Valentine’s Day?”

“I think you should go first,” Loki says after a sip of his own glass of incredibly dense, incredibly mouth-drying wine. He helps himself to some of the flatbread and brie and gestures expansively to Amora. “I want to hear about what you have to say.”

Amora’s grin turns into a softer, subtler smile. “Oh, dear. You’re not going to be proud of me after I’m through telling this one.”

Loki is, in fact, not proud but also not too ashamed of Amora after she’s told her story. Kept sane only from the promise that her Swedish Christmas fling would fly out to see her this past weekend, as of Monday Amora has been flung into a hate-induced dating app binge when Baldr not only didn’t show up, but made it clear that he was never interested in seeing her in any permanent sense. She has slept through the underclassmen ranks of Marvel U, University of Alaska Anchorage, and Alaska Pacific; had drinks with truckers and oil men in the area; FaceTimed with businessmen looking for a blonde sugar baby to take care of; even masturbated over Snapchat for random guys looking for trans women to jerk off to on dating apps called Hily. In the end, she has sworn to herself that it’s all her fault for forgetting the one true love of her life - Thor, who she has yet to win and who she thirsts over desperately.

“I know he will be mine by the time the next Valentine’s rolls around,” she pronounces smugly, raising her glass in cheers to the invisible man in the room. “I have a year to modify my personality and appearance to exactly what he wants, and then who knows what will happen? I’ve noticed he likes girls with brown and black hair. I’ve always been a blonde, but maybe a darker look will suit me.”

Loki chokes back the urge to gag, to tear Amora to shreds for being so utterly delusional and unfair to herself. Instead, he opts for the playful and the glib, says, “You would throw marriage and hot sex with Namor away for my dumb brother?”

Amora’s expression, which heretofore was sad in a self-pitying sort of way, becomes poignant. Her brow furrowed and her mouth pinched by a frown, she picks at the Granny Smith and Gala apple slices on the cheese plate and says, “I would still spend time with you guys. Thor and I could be polyamorous.”

“Oh, yeah, he would love that.” Loki smiles a wide, friendly smile and watches as their waiter comes around with their pescetarian-friendly entrees. As the little twinkish slip of a man slides away into the magenta-colored background of the restaurant, Loki allows himself to be a little mean and say, “You’re just forgetting that he doesn’t like you at all.”

Amora scoffs and swallows a mouthful of red. “He’ll love me yet. He just has to see me being good.”

Loki sighs loudly over his prawns and scallops, thoroughly uninterested in entertaining Amora’s delusional make-believe romance with his brother. He  _ clink _ s his fork against the stem of his wine glass a few times and singsongs, “My turn, my turn.”

“Let’s hear it, baby,” Amora says in her uncanny mock-American accent.

“Tony Stark wants to be with me again.” Loki lets the words sit in the air for a moment, watching Amora’s expression go from simply receptive to indicative of downright disgust. “He relapsed on everything, I guess, and now he’s either trying to leave Pepper or she’s trying to leave him and he came to my door begging for me to take him back and I, like the smart, mature person I am, pushed him away. I told him to leave.”

Amora, who has been slurping up angel hair pasta all through Loki’s short spiel, breaks into a smile and applauds a little at its end. “Well, tada! That’s perfect! You’re having a  _ good _ Valentine’s Day - you finally broke the spell that  _ efterbliven kukhuvud _ has had over you!”

Loki blushes. “God, I love it when you break out in the Swedish profanity. I don’t even want to know what that means.”

“No, you really don’t,” Amora retorts, cackling like a witch.

Loki takes a sip of wine and shakes his head a little. He almost regrets having to say it, having to be as V-Day Honest and Vulnerable as they’ve always been and thus probably beating Amora in the whole contest regarding who’s having the worst Valentine’s Day. He watches Amora dig in a little more and dines on his own seafood medley, then, when he can’t hold it in anymore, says, “I wanted to let him in.”

Amora’s gaze is hard and piercing. “You,” she says in a deep, kind of scary voice. “You’re the  _ efterbliven kukhuvud! _ ”

“Amora, he’s sick,” Loki barrels on unscatched, nearly breaking off into laughter when Amora just digs back into her dinner and wine with gusto - frantically twirling pasta around her fork and stuffing it into her mouth between sips of the Cab Sav. “He’s spiraling off into something dangerous, possibly even unprecedented now that he’s had his first real, actual, adult relationship.”

“With someone who isn’t you, yes,” Amora points out with a quickness.

“Oh, come on, Amora, it’s not like I’ve been with anyone either!” Loki half-cries out, sort of wanting to run away into a hole and die. They’re loud in the restaurant and they don’t really care; this is who they are, and they’ve only got so many years to be this way. Loki frowns into his glass of wine, sighs, and says, “It’s just… he’s this guy who’s capable of being so great, of being so good, but he’s just bullshit, and I’m bullshit too, and maybe that means we should be romantic sexy happy dysfunctional bullshit together.”

“Listen to yourself,  _ Älskling _ ,” Amora tuts. She looks at him affectionately, sweetly, even as she so obviously disapproves of him. “You think I’m so bad, but you’re willing to go for that guy just because he’s dysfunctional in the way you like?”

“We’re both fantastically mentally ill and fantastically needy,” Loki says, elaborating. “I’m good at taking care of him and he knows how to make me have fun.”

“Namor knows how to make you have fun and he’s not railing cocaine and cheating on his girlfriend to get with you!” Amora retorts. She has a point, and it makes Loki put his face in his hands and scream a little.

“I know, Amora,” he whines. “Tony is trash. He’s always going to be trash, just like me.”

“Please don’t say that like you’re in the same league,” Amora says, taking the last sip of her second glass. “You’re like egg shells, fertilizing my garden plants which bring me joy. He’s like, radioactive waste that sludges around in the shape of a person, contaminating everything he touches.”

Loki laughs so hard. He pours himself and Amora an additional glass of wine each, and they drive home with the bottle tucked into Amora’s huge crossbody bag. Amora sips at intersections while Loki tries to pay attention to the road, driving at moderate speed over the slick ice of the road, the sky surprisingly clear for a night in the middle of February. Having done his homework before dinner, Loki falls asleep in Amora’s bed after more hours sipping wine, more hours eating sweet things out of the kitchen, more hours listening to Karen O and Waxahatchee, more hours talking and laughing and snuggling close together beneath the covers. Loki thinks he could be content with having this for the rest of his days. He thinks he could forget about Tony Stark, could block his number and simply shut him out.

Then, on the day after Valentine’s Day, Tony Stark texts Loki and Loki is dominated by his inner conflict, the urge to turn away and the urge to give in.

  
  


> **Today** 6:33 PM
> 
> **tony stark  
> ** You should come over

  
  


Loki has just gotten home and is starting dinner with Thor - pasta with peperoncino, the angel hair boiling on the stove until it’s a nice al dente texture. Loki frowns at his phone, knowing tonight is absolutely out of the question with dinner, homework, and  _ GTA _ blocking out the next few hours and him positively determined to keep to his promised schedule with Thor. Instead of going mean and staunch with his rejection, though, Loki acts casual, cool, and collected.

  
  


> **loki skywalker  
> ** why though
> 
> **tony stark  
> ** Let’s hang out [winking face emoji]

  
  


Loki wants to fling his phone across the room. He’s an adult, though, so he keeps his shit firmly together.

  
  


> **loki skywalker  
> ** can’t do that. i have family time tonight and i’m not interested in making a huge mistake.
> 
> **tony stark  
> ** At least videochat me later. I know Starkphones don’t have FaceTime capability but there’s Skype and oovoo and Duo - I have Duo if you want to Duo

  
  


Loki stares at his phone, his thumb hovering over the touchscreen keyboard, ready to tap out a reply. The eagerness is both a turn-off and incredibly appealing, as always, and he knows this Tony better than he ever knew Sober Tony - this stray animal seeking comfort and attention, licking his hands for scraps, anime-eyed with his tail between his legs. The pasta timer is going off and he and Thor are draining the angel hair in a big silver colander borrowed from back home, and then they’re getting on with the rest of dinner and Loki is just barely managing to forget all about his phone until around 9:45 PM, when he and Thor are finishing up with the videogaming for the night and he’s washing dishes at the kitchen sink. Only after he has dried his hands does he text Tony back.

  
  


> **Today** 9:47 PM
> 
> **loki skywalker  
> ** we can duo in a few minutes

  
  


He hits himself as hard as he possibly can in the head and storms off to his bedroom, ignoring when Thor looks at him strangely and asks, “Are you okay, dude?”

Tony’s face is nearly unbearable to look upon when displayed on the screen of Loki’s iPhone - casual, smiling, somewhat dim in the pinkish light from the smartbulbs in his bedroom. Loki knows about the color-changing lightbulbs because he’s been in Tony’s bedrooms in Anchorage and Long Island before, knows this like he knows of Tony’s obsession with cultivating the proper ambiance whenever he can. Loki waits for Tony to start speaking first - this his opening gambit in a game he doesn’t even know how to win. 

“Hey, Loki,” Tony says in his best nonchalant, Cool Kid tone. He’s smiling, impeccably groomed, and happy to see him. “Family time on a Thursday - what, did your dad call and ask you all out to dinner?”

Loki hesitates - his first mistake. “It was just me and Thor,” he explains, stumbling all the way through his reply. “You know, being brothers, learning how to live together.”

Tony’s brow quirks in interest like he’s a cartoon character. “You two, being brothers? I thought you were against that, like, in a really big way. You were kind of gung-ho about hating him.”

“I so was not,” Loki half-lies, trying to conjure up every time he’d ever defended Thor against Tony or Namor or Hela or anyone else who would swear up and down that he hated his brother (and really, he does still hate Thor - just in a much less dire fashion; nowadays, Thor is actually kind of an alright dude in his book).

“You so did,” Tony retorts with a snicker. “What, are you guys sharing feelings now? Having little powwows?”

“Okay, first of all, don’t say  _ powwow _ like that to me,” Loki says in a sort of hard voice. “I don’t know which of the various parts of me is most offended about that.”

“Ooh, I’m being culturally insensitive,” Tony simpers, thoroughly pleased with himself as he always is (and even moreso when he’s high).

“Second of all, it’s really none of your business what Thor and I do on Thursdays.” Loki, propped up against his headboard, tries to look severe in the buttery light from his bedside lamp, in a sweater with cats on it and no dark black makeup. “If I wanted to tell you about that, I would have said something earlier when we were texting.”

“Jeeze, okay Loki.” Tony raises his hands in surrender. “I get it, I touched a nerve. You really have to stop being so sensitive, you know.”

“Duly noted,” Loki deadpans. Cocking his head just a bit to the side - “Is there something in particular you wanted to talk about? Because I was kind of looking forward to chilling for a while before bed, and you make my blood pressure go through the roof - not kidding.”

Tony laughs, his expression intensely pleased. “Are you saying that in a good way?”

Loki tries not to roll his eyes. “Is there a good way for someone’s blood pressure to go through the roof?”

“During sex, you know,” Tony says, and Loki could have seen that one a mile away. “Or just good old-fashioned flirting. My BP’s up, too, I bet. But that could also be from the coke…”

“Tony, what do you want to talk about? Because I really would rather just go to bed-”

“I wanted to know how your Valentine’s Day was,” Tony says, sounding serious. He’s reaching out of the bounds of his phone’s front camera for something, working with furious yet offhanded intensity on some project, and Loki wonders what it is until Tony is bringing a blunt up into the frame and lighting it; he could honestly roll his eyes. Tony takes a toke, then makes an encouraging gesture with his hand, saying through two lungfuls of smoke, “Go on, tell me.”

Loki frowns. “I went on a date with Amora and got really drunk, like I always do on Valentine’s Day. Why do you care?”

“Did you feel loved?” Tony asks through a cloud of smoke. His voice, clear and unslurred, is toxic candy to Loki’s ears. “It’s important that you felt loved on Valentine’s Day. What else is the point of the big two-fourteen.”

Loki allows himself a moment of thought. “Yes, I felt loved. I slept in my best friend’s bed and she would protect me from anything and everything.”

“Including me?” Tony asks smartly, winking. Loki could gag openly, but he doesn’t.

He just says, “Yes, including you. She thinks you’re radioactive waste.”

“Maybe I am.” Tony shrugs, his expression cheery. “You’re no better, though. That’s why you decided to get on this call with me.”

Loki almost feels enraged enough to hang up. Keeping his composure, though, he forces a smile and asks in his most crisply polite voice ever, “What about you, Tony? Did you feel loved?”

Tony makes a  _ hmm _ noise in the back of his throat, frowning. “No,” he says, and then he’s launching into the whole spiel about what he did on Valentine’s Day and Loki is regretting asking or getting on this call at all.

“I woke up feeling like shit, because I knew I was going to have to pretend to be sober all day, you know. Pepper doesn’t know I’ve relapsed. So I coked up immediately, knowing I’d need something to get me through the day. I’m so fucking compulsive, Loki, it’s ridiculous. It’s Wednesday, and Pep has her business courses in the morning, but I’ve arranged so that a bouquet of wildflowers - because that’s what she likes, right, wildflowers - gets delivered to her classroom just before class starts. She sends me a text, saying I’m overdoing it. Yeah fucking right, like she’d tolerate me being any other way. That puts me in a kind of sour mood, and you know I like to pair misery with alcohol, so I have myself a whiskey sour before class. During class. It’s in a Gatorade bottle, and nobody is going to look super close at this strange fluorescent liquid in a Gatorade bottle, so I’m all good. Did you notice how fucking weird everyone was on campus yesterday though? Everyone holding hands and getting into fights and crying over their smartphones. It’s like love exploded all over everyone, and I’m thinking to myself, I’m doing it better than all of them. I’m sending my girl flowers, I’m drunk in the middle of the day, I’m making it. Then it’s lunchtime and Pepper wants to meet up and do a like, lunch date thing with Steve and Peggy? Which is so totally weird, and I’m having to run to the bathroom beforehand to put in eyedrops and swish mouthwash and act like I haven’t been drinking whiskey sour out of a Gatorade bottle through class, and I actually do end up making it through lunch with Pep, who’s onto me, and Steve, who’s a god, and Peggy, who has no idea what’s going on even though Steve tells her everything. I make it through lunch. I am also a god. Pepper and I have dinner plans later, and I have class in the interim, but I’ve already done the homework and office hours with the professor - suffice it to say, I’ve got an acceptable enough grade in the class to skip on participation and attendance on Valentine’s Day. I head over to Polar Bar and drink some beers and play some pool with the one other guy in there - one of those Kenyan exchange students, that M’Baku? I swear he’s racist against white people - not that I said that to him for obvious self-preservatory reasons. By the time it’s 6:00, I’m pretty well wasted so I rail the line of coke I’ve been keeping in my car for emergencies on my way to dinner. And then there’s dinner with Pepper, and she’s worried about me, and she’s concerned I’m drifting away from her even though she knows nothing - literally nothing - about what’s going on. The whole time I’m thinking I could just be fucking living it up with you, Loki. Yes, you. I could be getting crossfaded and loving on you.  _ You  _ make me feel loved. Pepper just makes me feel mothered. When we slept together last night it was totally surreal - she reminds me so much of my mom sometimes it’s like, gross to even touch her like that - but I somehow gave her the orgasm she wanted and she went to sleep happy. And I wanted to be with you. So I got up and drank a few beers until I was good and ready to fall asleep, and then I slept.”

Loki knows that Tony has no idea how obnoxious he’s being, talking about his egregious substance abuse and reckless infidelity at every available opportunity. He knows that Tony thinks it sounds cool and outrageous, as if he is  _ l’enfant terrible _ blathering about all his vulnerabilities and his vices to the adults who would rather shut their ears and pretend as if he doesn’t exist (and isn’t he, really?). To Loki, though, he just sounds pathetic in every sense of the word, and Loki wants to tear him to shreds, but he opts for the less severe and just says, “I wish you knew what you sounded like.”

Tony, who is lighting up and taking another hit, furrows his brow. After properly holding in the hit and blowing out, he asks, “What do I sound like? Do I sound crazy? Do I sound insane?”

Loki permits himself to laugh. “You sound like a little boy who doesn’t know what he’s doing anymore.”

For the first time, Tony looks well and truly wounded by something Loki has said. Loki does an internal victory dance, pleased as punch to have won this round with him. “That was actually kind of mean,” Tony remarks as if he’s surprised that Loki could be that way to him, which is annoying.

“Sorry,” Loki says without meaning it. “Do you want to hang up on me now? Because I’d really like to go to bed.”

Tony frowns, then shakes his head, then sighs and says, “Okay, happy, healthy Loki. I’m going to keep texting you, you know.”

“I didn’t really doubt you would,” Loki says in a mock-nice voice.

“Sure.” Tony smiles suddenly, disarmingly, and salutes to Loki as he says, “Have a nice February. I still want to see you.” Then he’s hanging up, and Loki’s not sure how he’s supposed to feel about anything, least of all his temporary victory.

Tony texts Loki through the rest of February, and sometimes Loki answers. Mostly, though, Loki keeps to his schedule and goes to class. He and Thor do their research presentation on the mother of Christ in Women, Religion, and Culture, and Dr. Lawson makes appreciative noises at them, and Loki is actually kind of happy through February’s fourth week - happy enough to forget that Thursday is family night and come home with Namor and Amora on Thursday after work. Coincidentally, he isn’t the only one feeling friendly; when he and his darlings walk in the house, they are greeted by Thor and his posse gathered in the living room, clustered around where Thor and Sif are currently playing  _ Grand Theft Auto _ . Loki doesn’t know whether to feel embarrassed or wounded.

“I thought  _ I  _ was playing  _ GTA _ tonight,” he says into the living room, watching as everyone looks up at him and his friends. Thor squints at him.

“You brought your friends,” he retorts in an accusatory way, glancing back at the screen, where Sif’s virtual avatar is currently speeding down a simulated freeway. “We were just about to order some food - do you want Taco Bell or pizza?”

Loki, making his way into the living room to stand behind the sofa, nearly touching the back of Thor’s pretty blond head, contorts his face into the expression most befitting his disgust. “Do I look like I eat Taco Bell? Does Taco Bell have vegetarian options, Thor?”

“It doesn’t,” Thor says, grumbly.

“It sure doesn’t,” Namor intones from where he’s peering into the refrigerator to get the Brita and pour himself a glass of water with a splash of lemon juice. 

“That pizza place we were looking at has all kinds of pizzas and pastas and veggie calzones,” Fandral puts in from where he and Hogun are sitting on the second sofa, the one Loki usually likes to nest in. Helpfully, he hands his phone to Loki and shows him a whole two-page menu full of options and entrees - even vegan pizzas. Loki is impressed.

“Well, why aren’t we ordering from this place?” He pokes Thor juvenilely in the back of the head. “ _ Taco Bell _ , my ass.”

Within ten minutes, they’ve got four pizzas, cheesy bread, a lasagna, a bottle of wine, and a bundle of White Claws ordered from Uncle Joe’s Pizzeria. Everyone Venmos Fandral cash for their allotted share of the food and drinks, and then they’re sitting around passing the Xbox controller around, playing rock paper scissors to decide who gets to play for a period of fifteen minutes. Namor wins the first turn after competing with both Sif and Thor, and there is a collective reshuffling of everyone around the television and on the assorted seating arrangements. Loki ends up with his legs in Namor’s lap as his friend plays in a free-for-all deathmatch on  _ GTA _ ’s online multiplayer component, Sif on Namor’s other side, Thor and Amora on the floor in front of the sofa, and everyone else in more or less their same positions all over the living room. Namor’s character guns a couple of other players down; he snorts.

“So this is what you’ve been doing on Thursdays and Sundays, is it, Loki?” he asks, sounding a little derisive but truthfully not meaning anything ill. “It’s exhilarating mashing buttons and having no idea what I’m doing while holding the virtual lives of so many anonymous others in my hands.”

“I don’t like the multiplayer mode, people are rude on that,” Loki says sort of defensively, then adds, “I find that playing this gives me a welcome release of aggression on a biweekly basis.”

“Lord knows he’s aggressive enough,” Sif comments kind of boldly, and Loki would make a face at her if he cared enough. Thor laughs.

“Can you imagine if Loki was more aggressive, though?” he asks the room, not just Sif in particular, and thinking of what he has just said, he whistles lowly, his eyes finding the ceiling. “I’m pretty sure Loki could kick my ass if he wanted to.”

Amora, sitting next to him in her slutty tank top and (knowing her) hoping he’ll take a look at her tits, smiles at him and asks, “You mean he hasn’t already?”

Without looking up from where he’s playing Mahjong on his phone, Loki says, “A miracle of God, I know.”

“You tried to once,” Thor says.

“When you sprained my ankle,” Loki observes coolly.

“You totally could have walloped me if you’d gone at things differently!” Thor says in what Loki assumes is supposed to be an encouraging way. He smiles at Loki, and Loki feels impish enough to reach over and smush Thor’s face with his hand.

“Dammit!” Namor cries as his character is summarily killed off by dickwrangler69. Flipping the bird at the television and passing the controller to Sif, he concedes defeat. “What a fucking asshole. Good game, though.”

“Did you really just say ‘ _ good game _ ’?” Loki asks in his most elaborately disgusted tone. Thor is grinning, and Namor is looking at him oh so sadly.

“I did. Can you punish me already?”

The food arrives. Namor wolfs down his lasagna and everyone else partakes of the pizza and cheesy bread. The Merlot is just a little dry, the cheapest wine on the menu but sufficiently fruity and boozy. Loki shares two glasses with Amora and eats half a margherita pizza, Sif absolutely owns on  _ GTA Online _ , and they don’t get any homework done but he and Thor are laughing at each other’s jokes by the end of the night, and that’s something Loki never thought he’d see happen, least of all in this semester. His friends and Thor’s friends are hanging out. They’re eating good food and entertaining each other, and after Sif passes off the controller to Volstagg, they put on some really loud, really shitty rap music and annoy the neighbors for a little while. Loki listens to his brother rap along to some filthy, ridiculous bassline and feels himself fill up with bubbles, with laughter. It’s surreal and he likes it.

That night, Amora and Namor spend the night in Loki’s bed. It’s a queen size, so there’s some squeezing involved. With Loki lodged firmly in the middle of his mattress between his two favorite people, their sleepover commences - all of them a little drunk thanks to the wine and the White Claw, all of them a little dazed by the turn of events the night has taken.

“ _ Herregud _ , Thor is literally right across the hall,” Amora says into her pillow, giggling.

“Amazingly, I sleep with him in this exact place every night,” Loki comments. The room is warm and he is snuggled into Namor’s side; tucking his mouth into his friend’s neck, he whispers, “You think if I stop talking now she’ll shut up about Thor?”

“Bet,” Namor murmurs back, putting his hand on Loki’s hip and squeezing. A few moments of silence pass, blissful and sweet, before Amora is speaking again, this time squirming against Loki’s right side as she does.

“He’s alone, isn’t he? Maybe I’ll go to him once he’s sleeping.”

In unison, Loki and Namor pronounce, “Find God.”

Amora whines loudly. “You guys are no fun!”

“Why don’t you perv on a man who will love you?” Namor asks in a pointed, mean tone. “His name is Jesus.”

Loki laughs so hard he thinks he breaks something. He laughs so hard he cries, and Amora just wraps herself around him and holds him like his life depends on it. 

In the dark, conversation slips to Tony, who texted Loki all through the night’s dinner about Pepper and Rhodey and Steve and all the other university people who don’t really matter. When Loki lets his friends read the text messages - the whole stupid discouse about whether or not Tony was meant to be an alcoholic and his friends were just waiting on him to fail, blah blah blah - they snort and threaten to just block Tony right then and there.

“Don’t block him, guys,” Loki begs with a sigh, snatching his phone out of Amora’s hands before she can do the unimaginable. “I can put up with this bullshit. It’s actually kind of interesting when it’s not so fucking annoying.”

Earnestly, Namor looks at Loki. “You know he’s full of shit, right? How many ways do I have to say it?”

Loki closes his eyes and cuddles into his friend as he’s criticizing him. “Loud and clear,” he murmurs. “I’m just waiting until it escalates into something even more fun. Who knows? Maybe he’ll surprise me.”

“Maybe he’ll have an overdose and die,” Amora says cheerfully. Maybe he will, and Loki will be so sorry to see it.

That night, he sleeps with his best friends. They kiss him goodnight and doze through the midnight hours, and when Friday morning rolls around, they all have coffee and weed before going off to class. Thor says hi to Amora and Namor before they leave the house, and it’s actually kind of cool - having a semi-blended friend group at least temporarily. Loki ends February feeling great despite every fiber in him telling him not to, and he doesn’t know if it’s his own doing or the machinations of fate for once.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> have a soundtrack: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4jXjFXy4bUsZHVsxA3vhsV?si=g1OOCmfZSqq0okZ4fZjcQw


End file.
